Bio's Reset and stuff?

First of all, let me say hello to all. I am new to this great site, don't know how I missed this spot but oh well stuff happens. I have recently recieved donations form a library of 3 pc's, 2 Gateway 2000's and a micro Dell. All had to have the cmos battery yanged out to clear the password protected bio's, so that I can reinstall to wipe the drive clean. One of the Gateways went fine, but its twin wants to have issues(don't they all). After clearing the bios and reinstalling the cmos battery(3 differt ones). The system now hangs at the post. I get the initian beep to validate the PG then it hangs. If I try to hit the f1 abd go into setup, it says"entering setup..." but then hangs. It also will not get past the initial load of drivers. I tried swapping the jumper to recovery mode but I can't get and viseo drivers to load, so I am blind. Only when I set the jumper back to normal do I get my screen back. So experts, is this a motherboard thing or a Gateway thing? Any ideas?

I have a group of students that except old legacy systems(or anything for that matter) and try our best to fix them, then we donate them to chairty who will find the familys that cannot afford to get a system. Least this gives them some help, otherwise the systems would probably get scraped. The students have a blast just getting to work on them