[ale] hardware headache

[Sean Kilpatrick]

Turned on the computer this afternoon and it seemed to hang
at the very beginning of the BIOS boot sequence.So I pressed
"F2" to enter setup and waited nearly 3 minutes for the BIOS
setup screen to appear.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary
other than  my zip drive seems to have died as the BIOS doesn't
see it and it won't eject the disk. 
So I exited the Setup and the system "rebooted."  Again the
box just sat for about three minutes before the BIOS began the
boot process.  Once it started things seemed to progress at
the normal rate and, obviously this FC3 system is up and running.
Best I can tell all the crucial bits and pieces seem to be working fine.

Are there any software tools that might help me pinpoint the problem?

I'm thinking the power supply could be getting flaky, but it seems
unlikely it would cause a problem at a cold boot. 
Maybe the BIOS battery is causing a problem?

I can power down the box and unplug both power and data cables from
the Zip Drive, but I don't know if that might help.
And, obviously, while the box is open I can check the output of the power
supply.
This is a P4, 1.6 GH system, on an Intel mobo (I think).  

But I'm hoping that there are software tools that might help me 
diagnose the problem.

Sean

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