i just formatted my drive and everything went smoothly. i was able to access bios and boot from my floppy or CD drives. when i deactivated quickboot from my bios (which is AMI) and deleted the old partitions in my hard drive, the computer wouldn't let me boot at all. it now displays (and didnt used to) the black bios screen. it checks the memory (i already removed a stick because it would freeze at 700mb out of 1024 before) then displays my memory settings (the hertz, etc) and freezes. when i press f11 for the boot menu during the memory check, i can see the option go from "f11: boot menu" to "go->boot menu". But the computer freezes and locks the keyboard up after the check. i can't even hit ctrl+alt+delete to reboot it. My goal is to repartition my hard drive so i can reinstall windows. will updating my bios help? if so, how do i do it? my motherboard is a MSI K8T Neo2.

You might find in your BIOS that there is an option that reduces the amount of memory that is detected so that it only reads 256Mb. I'm not sure what it would be labelled as but it's there for compatibility with operating system installation routines. I the option is there, the motherboard manual should tell you quite clearly which one it is - it's the only one of it's kind. That might stop the problem with it freezing whilst it checks the memory.

When you say that you "deleted the old partitions in my hard drive", do you mean that you were able to boot the PC from a floppy disk or CD and see the hard disk drive and the partitions that were on it and delete them (e.g. using FDISK or Windows XP Setup) ? If so, it's safe to say that your BIOS detected the presence of your hard disk. However, if it's using the Auto-Detect option, this can be temperamental and sometimes it's necessary to manually type in the drive parameters. See the link in my signature for an article about how to Auto-Detect the hard disk or enter the settings manually if it doesn't work. In theory, this shouldn't stop the BIOS completing the memory checks but it wouldn't be the first time I've seen odd problems like that. Completely disconnecting the hard disk might also cure the BIOS "posting" problem and help you troubleshoot it.