Hi, I have a PC I am working on and I am pretty sure the problem is the board. All the other stuff works on another PC and just got a new cpu and it still is the same. It has no OS and it stops at verifying DMI data pool...... and the red light is on for a while and then goes out. I left it set over night one time and was the same the next morning. It is a M5ALA ver2.0 with a brand new AMD K6-2 500 speed CPU, I now have 2 of these CPUs because I thought maybe that was the problem but is the same. The board is set at 100 speed at X5. Is it worth having this board checked or just scrap it and get something else? Will this CPU run XP with enough dimm and 18 gig of hard drive? Anyone have a suggestion on another board that would be better and still let me use the k6-2 or are they no good either. It is just a old PC I am playing with and don't really need it so I don't want to spend alot on it, just a learning experience. We spent alot of money on it when we got it and so I would like to make it work again and also improve it some also. I have replaced the board already with a used one from ebay but at the time did not know the dimm sticks were bad, it would just sit and make one long beep with the old dimm so I don't know if the bad dimm might have messed up this board to or if I just got stuck with a bad board to begin with, it was a used board. same board but a ver 2.0 old one was ver 1.2 I think, also went from a AMD 400 to AMD 500 CPU book says it can be set at 100 speed up to X5.5. It acts normal when starting up, one short beep then goes through the boot up procedure with the lights comming on in the floppy drive and cd drive and keyboard, hard drive starts and fans run, reset works but it gets stuck at the DMI thing. When the PC was working from new on it froze all the time with 98 on it, I read about problems with the M5ALA board causing this. I put 98 from the same disk on a old packard bell and it don't freeze it is just slow because of slow CPU. I tried booting with boot disk and 98 install disk but it won't read either one of them. It looks to me like it has detected all the right stuff installed in it also. I have down loaded some update drivers for the board but can't update if I can't get it to where I can install OS. Sorry for the long post. TomW