Dying BIOS/motherboard?

[Fluffy_624]

Having problems trying to troubleshoot my brothers pc over the phone from 130 miles away.
It started with Half Life 2 crashing which their tech support people tracked down to the sblive sound card. Went into the bios to enable onboard sound after removing card from pc, saved and exited and the sata drive had dissapeared on reboot.
Went back into bios and in the boot drive selection menu the option that was there to choose which hard drive to use has vanished. Did a full power down(turn on with power disconnected to drain caps etc.) and this time the POST freezes on detecting secondry slave. Wait 5 mins, power down and clear cmos and now it just freezes at point where it says amibios in top right corner.
The battery has been checked with a voltmeter and is showing 1.4v so i don't think that's the problem.
Any suggestions or tips that i can try would be greatly appreciated.

System specs:
p4c 2.6ghz
asus p4p800
2GB crucial pc3200
maxtor 300GB diamondmax 10
WD 40GB
1x cdrw
1x dvdrom
antec trupower 430w
leadtek gf6800

[BipolarBill]

Check for bad capacitors:

http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/index27.htm

www.badcaps.net

[davewuk]

Battery level should be closer to 3V, I think the minimum level to support the CMOS is deemed to be around 2.2V so 1.4 is too low

[Fluffy_624]

I'll get him to look for that tomorrow.
He has been able to get it to boot since then. It could see everything fine in bios and booted into windows. At this point installed the sound drivers for the onboard sound and rebooted.
And it just keeps rebooting itself at same point on loading windows desktop. If its booted into safe mode it lasts about a minute before it just freezes.
Quite soon i can see him booting it out of the window if i can't solve this for him.

Thanks again for any help.


Edit: Meant to say 2.4v in top post. Sorry