My thoughts on DMI Pool freezes and delays
Ok, I have had numerous experiences with the dreaded DMI pool freezing problem...here are my findings and thoughts
I do not believe that it is a hard drive issue as much as it is a MB issue. When people have success by installing another hard drive, that is most likely from some CMOS Setting being reset in some manner and thus eliminating the problem...the DMI Pool as far as I know, exists in the Bios...correct me if I am wrong.
I have had DMI pool freezes, and DMI pool (long) delays before boot ie 2 to 5 minutes and then it will boot and act normal. Sometimes running fdisk /mbr will work...though again I think it is not to do directly with the hard drive, but rather a setting that gets reset in the Bios and corrects problem. Sometimes doing the other changes to the Bios will trip the correction
One thing is for sureÂ…a DMI freeze can be triggered from a new piece of hardware especially from a NIC Card.
I had the strangest occurrence of the DMI pool very recently...here is the scenario:
I recently repartitioned and formatted a drive for an ABIT BH6 MB flashed with the latest Bios and Loaded with 256 Megs Ram and a Pentium III 550E processor. I installed a fresh copy of windows 98 SE and proceeded along like all other 10,000 times I have before. Everything was great. Operating system installed with no glitches…and all drivers loaded easily, I had forgotten to put in my LAN card however, so the next thing I did was install it and reboot, and WHAM! A huge delay verifying the DMI pool…not a total freeze, but a good 3 minutes before the machine would wake up and finish booting. So I tried the obvious, and uninstalled the NIC Card, and Walla! no more delay…reinstall card, and DMI delay again. So, the obvious thought is bad card…right? Well, I tried 3 more different makes of cards and always the same thing…Now it is getting to be ridiculous, so I tried all the tricks in the book with the Bios and replaced all things like IDE Cables; RAM etc. Tried fdisk /mbr and even went so far as to reload operating system on another drive…and still same thing!!! So aggravating!! Ok, so I finally decide to tell client that it is an “added layer of protection against any quick start surges” to have a long delay and that it is a good thing…just kidding J I decided that I could accept a 3 minute delay if that was how it had to be…So I went ahead with configuring the Network settings in order to get connected to the network and internet…One of the things I had to change was the default setting of “Microsoft Family Logon” to “Clients for Microsoft Networks”, and of course being Win 98, I had to reboot……you are not going to believe it, as I can hardly still, but the computer then rebooted normally, and has never since gone into DMI freeze!!! I haven’t the slightest clue as to why or how that could be, bit it turns out to be that I needed to have the Windows 98 Network settings set to “Clients for Microsoft Networks”, and that solved it?
Hope this might help anyone so they donÂ’t put in the 20 hours or so trying to fix problem. If anyone has any ideas why, this might have happened, please share.
Bye all and sorry for such lengthy explanation.
Rees