System freeze on boot after DMI Pool verification

Greetings. I got such excellent help here last time, so I decided to visit again and see if you all could help again. BTW, the system has been running mint since the last help I got here.
Situation is this: We had a lightning storm come through last night, so I shut my system down and unplugged it. I made a mental note to myself that I should take out the 512K of SDRAM that was currently in the box and replace it with the 256K of DDRAM that originally came with the box. As to why I didn't leave it, well, I hadn't kept up with the latest innovations and went strictly by the numbers. I have since learned the errors of my ways.
The swapping done, I booted the system. It verified the RAM, verified all my IDE devices, and got to the second screen where all that technical info is. It gave the DMI Pool verification message, then went to check for a bootable cd. As it happens, there wasn't a bootable cd in the drive, and then it just hanged there. Several characters also disappeared off the screen, such as the 'r' in Primary Hard Drive in the aforementioned technical information box, one of the numbers in the left column of the PCI Devices, and so on. This sort of character disappearing has happened to me before when I had the NTLDR go missing on me. This thread here has all those details, but the problem is solved. I swapped the memory back to the original configuration, but it still won't boot. The only change I made was switching that RAM. The system will boot a CDROM, so I will be able to access the Recovery Console and such if needed.
Please help if you can. Thanks in advance.
TC

 

I have attempted to repair the installation by using both fixmbr and fixboot from the Recovery Console. No effect.
I unplugged the primary HD and booted to get a "non-system disk" error. The problem is definitely the HD.
I tried swapping the SDRAM back in, but that didn't work.
My head hurts, and I'm just about ready to scream. It was starting out as such a nice day.

 

I have attempted to perform an in-place install as per procedure 3 of this document, but the results are the same.
I have booted the system using a Knoppix 3.6 cd, and my data is perfectly intact. I can access anything on the drive, it just won't boot.
I'm about out of ideas. If anyone has a suggestion other than getting a new hard drive, it would be much appreciated.

 

Used Knoppix to run a check for bad sectors. Nothing turned up, though I did previously find a few problems with chkdsk in the Recovery Console. It took quite awhile for it to finish, but even that didn't help. I tried fixboot and fixmbr after the chkdsk, but to no avail. I have reformatted the drive and am currently installing Windows 2000 again. It rebooted just fine, so I guess my problem is fixed, if not resolved.

 

Sounds like your BIOS got corrupted. I would have suggested you boot into BIOS and select the default setup for BIOS to return it to exactly what was in the flash ROM. Also, removing the CMOS (CR2023 or similar) battery for a few minutes, or removing the battery and shorting the positive and negative terminals in the battery socket on the motherboard would also clear the CMOS.
If you experience any other display corruptions on the BIOS boot screen(s), it may be worth reflashing the BIOS either with the same BIOS version flash file or better still, a newer version if available for your motherboard model.

I would still set the BIOS back to the defaults settings in case of any lingering coruption, then make any other changes if you know what they are.

 

Yeah, I tried setting the BIOS back to default. No effect. Tried setting it to the other option it gave me (who knew BIOS now had safe mode? ) and that didn't work either.