BIOS bullshit

[Daigohji]

My PC started randomly freezing on startup a couple of months ago. It's infrequent, but enough to make me very worried. Normally it freezes while the motherboard's manufacturer splash screen is up, but today I managed to get it to switch the display to the POST screen before it froze. The result was the photo above. The obvious difference between the above screen and when I have a successful boot sequence is that it says "a la la la la la" where it should have the model of the ATAPI DVD drive. Nothing else is different or missing from that screen.

Any idea what the hell is wrong? I've had this PC for two years, and this is the first problem I've had with it.

[kernow]

Unplug the cdrom drive and see if it still does it.

[akumajo]

ide cable, ide port or dvd drive is dead

try with another ide cable first

[StarCreator]

Is your optical drive SATA or PATA (IDE)? If it's SATA, you could also try plugging it into a different port along with the above suggestions.

[Daigohji]

It's SATA. I'll try unplugging the DVD drive the next time it acts up,but I'm not sure if the mobo has a spare SATA port to try switching it to.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[StarCreator]

Oh, and I'm also going to throw out the suggest to run memtest86+ at your first opportunity, because bad RAM makes -everything- go bad, and often in unpredictable ways.