Dell dimension 4500 boots up to extended set ASCII characters in lower right corner

[newbie~wan]

I came into work this morning and one of our Dell PC's, that appeared to be running just fine, was rebooted. Upon reboot, nothing happened. None of the usual bootup screens (like the big blue Dell logo) or anything. Just a black screen with one ASCII characeter in the lower right corner, which would change about once a second.

If I reboot the computer and strike F2 continuously, I can get into the BIOS, but everything looks fine. Has anyone seen this happen? Is this some kind of BIOS virus or something? The PC did have anti-virus software on it.

TIA

[newbie~wan]

So the guy tells me a hour later "oops, I had a disk in the floppy drive". In that case I would think that it would have give the message:

"Non system disk. Replace and strike any key when ready" - we all know that one.

Anyway, seems to be working fine now, but very strange about the characters thing........