electrostatic discharge

ok,
I want your guys opinion on this.
I went to a LAN party this weekend, which involved taking my tower, throwing it on the floor in the back seat, and strapping my monitor in the car seat for a 20 minute round trip drive. Now, ever since the first time I rebooted at the party, the first cold boot will lockup when it's selecting a boot media (ie: boot from cd: then nothing happens). So it never makes it to lilo and i just reboot (also ignores the ctrl-alt-del interrupt so I'm thinking processor fault?). The second time I booted i got into windows, but after I logged in, the display went hay-wire and everything was locked up so i reset. Then everything was fine, and i've restarted several times and no such symptoms occured since. So, I called my buddy and asked if his pc was acting funny. He said he had the same thing. So im thinking maybe it's some kind of virus...but i don't see how that would mess with the bios...i ran 2 different antivirus programs and so far nada so im ruling that out sort of. Do you guys have any idea whats going on? I hope it's not the processor...it might be under warranty, but damn.

What were the conditions of the party? IE were they on carpet? If his has it also im willing to bet the answer lies in their setup.

That's odd. I've traveled with my tower a lot of times and never had any problems. Here's my ideas:

1) You took a bump in the car that rattled something, maybe even damaged a few sectors on the HD, and it took a reboot for windows to repair the broken files!? (Not highly likely at all, especially since the same happened to your friend).

2) Virus. Most likely also ruled out because of your research since.

3) ESD? Possibly. Maybe a network card surge? Who knows what could have hit it. My conclusion sits with the LAN party config. Exactly what about it? Who knows. I doubt it's your processor tho. You'd start to notice other things if it was that.

BTW, if it's 2K or XP, check the Event Viewer. Maybe that could tell you something.

yeah no viruses,
and it didn't do it at all yesterday.

The setup was crap, we couldn't get our hands on any switches so we had a router feeding into hubs...yeah...it was lame, but it worked.

Is it cold where you live. If so, I have had computers that have been outside for a while in sub zero temperatures have their bio's reset, or even just a few values off because of the lowered cmos battery power due to the cold. It's one possiblility anyways. You say there is no problems anymore?

My computer used to do that back in days when I went to LAN parties. Usually I'd just reboot two or three times, and then it would work again.

we have big lans fairly regularly and I dont think we've had one yet where someone hasnt showed up with a computer that doesnt work. The problem is always different though the seating of pci/agp cards is common. I think someones hard drive died about six months ago... probably a head clash.

I figure if the pc works now... let the gremlins lie :)

Well, What Kinasz says is something that might be the problem, if you have computer parts which have loose parts(such as a HD head), something might get jammed, and that might cause the problem. It is probably not electrostatic charge as unless you open the case, most cases I know of are designed to direct any electrical charge to the surface of the case away from any internal part.

Since it get stuck at the boot from cd, that would make me think the cd drive might be loose inside somewhere. However the floppy light comes on and stays one as well, so it could be that. And it's happening again, but it only happens after a cold reboot, if it's been running it doesn't do it. I'll disconnect the floppy first and see what happens.
Thanks

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However the floppy light comes on and stays one as well, so it could be that.

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That is classic symptom of floppy (ribbon) cable being reversed. You didn't unplug it at the party did you? Won't do any harm tho.

im aware of that, but the drive works so that can't be the case, for some reason the bios gets upset and keeps trying to read the floppy and cd drive is my guess. It's stuck in some sort of loop.