I have a major startup problem with vista home premium

[Halyn]

I have installed vista home premium on my system and using it for over a year with no issues. The next day when i restarted my system. The manufactures logo which normally comes up for about 20 seconds before going ahead on to the microsoft welcome screen, it stayed on for at least 5 minutes and after that the screen went black for a couple of minutes. Then a short blinking cursor came up with a message saying that "Bios not installed!", then one more time the screen went black for several minutes and then a message came that the pc could not start and a message prompted to select an option for automatic repair. I selected it and after 10 minutes an automated system restore performed, my system booted up and everything seemed to run ok. This morning when i decided to restart again. At that time I did not get any messages to run any repairs, the system stayed at the manufactures logo for several minutes, then a black screen appeared for several more minutes before finally getting to the microsoft welcome screen. Anyone have any idea about what might be happening and how to fix it.

The configuration of my system that i have is windows vista home premium, service pack 2. Intel Core 2 Quad CPU.
Q6600. 4GB Ram, 32 bit operating system.

[Devasis]

I'll suggest you to do backup of your hard drive, your important files, before you perform any operation. Run a software utility to evaluate the hard drive which you can get on the hard drive manufacturer's web site.
If the hard drive passes a problem which is most likely related the power supply. Most of the computer hardware problems are related to hard drive or power supply, particularly the power supply, as most pre-built machines are powered by the cheapest unit. Even though high-end power supplies fail, probably on a part with hard drives. In this case the motherboard components can fail, but that is not very common. In most modern motherboards like yours if the battery has died you will be usually forced to boot into the BIOS set-up screen where you will see an incorrect date and settings have defaulted to basic. The battery backs up custom settings, including the date. If you are not aware of troubleshooting these problems, for example have a second power supply you can try to see if it solves the problem, you should get professional help.

[jesse]

I disagree with devasis. The batteries are not the problem, battery keeps the clock running, which maintains the settings that you have made via the BIOS update routine. The BIOS code itself is in ROM someplace, that's a non-volatile storage and it does not need a power source to keep the data intact. But the message which you are getting says that there was no BIOS installed. Maybe the BIOS chip is having some trouble.

[Calvin K]

It seems to be that you are facing a hardware problem. If I had this problem on a bench, I would suggest a good known power supply as a first guess. Next, if it did not solve the problem, then I would be looking for a motherboard malfunction. Many of the desktops are sold at a retail level and have low capacity power supplies which seems to have a high failure rate. In addition, from my point of view the motherboard may fail early due to cheap capacitors.