With 3 PCs in use, I have never experienced such a problem, hence clueless as to what to do (can't find emergency CD either).
Trying to power up an older (vantage 2005) PC (Win XP). It freezes on the first frame (showing lines of text... the BIOS etc...) and never goes beyond there. Tried to locate the so called "emergency disk" in vain.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. TIA.

If it doesn't go beyond the first lines of the bios, then a boot disk won't help much. This could be anything from a corrupted CMOS setup to a physical defect in the machine. Does the machine make any beeping noises?

Try reseating all the memory chips. That is usually one of the first things that the BIOS will check and it could be causing the freeze. But, as ScottC says, if you can't get past the BIOS then a boot disk won't help.

On the plus side, odds are that your data is very safe on the HD should you choose to mount it in one of the other systems.

After you reseat the chips, reset the BIOS to factory default settings... you may need to get the manual for the motherboard (should be online):

Unplug the system.
remove the CMOS battery; wait 30 seconds
Move the reset jumper into position (this is what you may need the manual for if not clearly labeled on the motherboard)
plug in and power on
power off and unplug
move the jumper back into normal position
replace the cmos battery

Total guess, but if it's that old, though 2005 isn't that old, the CMOS battery may have died and it doesn't have any setup information.

Just to be safe I would unplug the disk for now and start it up and try to get into the bios. Depending on when it's dying you may see the message on how to do it, if not try the following, depending on who made the bios

AMI BIOS: Del key during the POST
DTK BIOS: Esc key during the POST
Award BIOS: Ctrl-Alt-Esc
misc BIOS: Ctrl-Esc
Phoenix BIOS: Ctrl-Alt-Esc or Ctrl-Alt-S
IBM PS/2 BIOS: Ctrl-Alt-Ins after Ctrl-Alt-Del

Before it dies. It may be as simple as just going into the bios, putting all the settings back and saving it and restarting. Of course, it's possible it's not.

If you get the bios to work, it will try to start up and say there's no disk, because you unplugged it, you can go ahead and plug the disk back in and go back into the bois to let it know there's a disk there.

If resetting the BIOS doesn't do it, hook up a different power supply to it, (Assuming you are like me and have spares lying about...)

I'd assume that most are not like you in this regard.

You mean when the motherboard in the old PC goes bad, not everyone pulls the perfectly good (albeit dust filled and underpowered) power supply and puts it in the closet next to the 2X CD drives?

Spell check: should be vintage 2005 (not vantage, sorry)

Thank you all for jumping in. I will copy and paste all suggestions and find time to follow the recommendations. Not particularly handy at this sort of things, but worth a try. My key concern is the data recovery. Good thing I have other PC to use in the meantime. I know I have a project for this weekend.

When powering it up, I don't hear any unusual noise other than that from the fan.

Will keep you posted. Thanks.

Not hearing a "click, click", from the hard drive when you power up is a good thing. It's likely that the drive is readable still. The way to find out is to pull the drive and connect it to your existing PC as a secondary drive. The easiest way to do this is:

1. Disconnect the power and data cables from the CD drive(s) of the working PC and connect them to the drive in question (power turned off while doing this). You can put a small cardboard box -no metal- next to the PC and you can set the drive on it while testing.)

2. Power up the working PC and go into the BIOS. If you see a hard drive attached to the Secondary IDE port as a Master, it means that it sees your drive.

3. Exit the BIOS and go into Windows and hopefully it will see your 2nd drive. Look for it in My Computer.

4. If you see it, copy your important files to the C drive of this machine.

An easier alternative is to put the drive in a USB drive case and read it via the USB port, but I'm guessing you don't have one of these handy.

If that's your key concern, then find another system and move the drive over. Make it you're "D" drive (anything but boot) and then, assuming the drive is healthy, back up your files! You can also purchase an inexpensive housing to turn the drive into an external USB drive.

I would strongly advise minimizing the troubleshooting you do (especially messing around with power supplies or the motherboard) while you are admittedly inexperienced and have valuable data on board.

Hi all,
With all your suggested �to do list� on hand, I dived in to my little weekend project. Long story short. I have good news and some not so good news.

I cleaned up and reseated all DRAM SIMMs (they are located near the fan and have collected lots of dust); did the same with the CMOS battery (did not have one on hand to replace it). With only keyboard, monitor and mouse hooked up, the system booted successfully on the first try. I am relieved that the hard drive is OK, as many of you had so correctly pointed out. I proceeded to hook up all peripheral cables and boot up again. This time (and many times since) it hung up at the same place as it did before (never passed the BIOS section).

So, what should I do now in addition to changing the battery (which I will pick one up from the local Fry's)?

By the way, the BIOS is by AMS.
No, I don�t happen to have power supply around house!

Deeply thankful for all your suggestions. Please let me know what I need to do next.

Sounds like an overcurrent situation there on the USB ports.

Sanosuke!

I agree with Sanosuke that there is enough of a current draw on the power supply that it is preventing the system from booting. If you disconnect the peripherals, it works? If so, what are the peripherals? Either one of them is bad and drawing excess current or the power supply 5 volts is weak and is being sucked down by a USB device. If this is the case, I do think you need to put in a new power supply. The old one was probably a 200 - 300 watt supply. I'd put in a 450 watt supply.

Do tell us, though, what are the peripherals?

Mbreuer, Sanosuke and wdwright,
Thank you for your collective suggestions and recommendations. Here's the picture:

When it successfully booted once, the peripherals I connected were a mouse (non-USB), keyboard (non-USB), and LCD monitor (non-USA). No USB port was used at that instant. But I could not boot with success without any change of the above.
Under normal condition, I have one HP Office Jet multi-function printer (again non-USB) and 1 biz-card scanner (USB port used) and a network adopter (external WiFi, USB port used)
On the issue of power supply, I have a 400W supply.

New development: I put in a new battery and that did not change anything. System never gets past the BIOS phase.

At this point, if nothing simple can resurrect the system (I don�t want to mess with the power supply), I incline to remove the hard drive and put it on another system as suggested.

If possible, let me hear from you again before I close this thread.