PC has started playing up!

[Daze]

After adding the Accelero X2 cooler to my X1900XT last night, everything was running fine. Life was good...

I came home from work tonight to find my PC won't boot at all! In safe mode, I can see that it's getting stuck at the crcdisk.sys stage. Iirc my PC has also hung at the boot stage, when the manufacturers logo is displayed. This only happened once though.

I tried to perform a repair from the Vista DVD. It loads all of the files from the DVD and, when the Vista loading animation appears, it stops doing anything. I tried disconnecting my master HD and the same thing happened, so it doesn't look like a HD issue (to me at least).

I can't work out why it would work fine last night, only for me to turn it on tonight to find it's not working. I can't work out if it's a hardware failure of some kind or a software issue.

Any ideas?

 

[!TIMMY!]

1. Put the old cooler on and see if it carrys on.

2. Reinstall drivers (my graphics card started playing up a little when I took it out and put it back again without changing anything).

3. If worst comes to worse, format C: (god i miss typing that before installing windows)

 

[Daze]

I've just managed to get it to boot into Vista.

I removed the CMOS battery and re-configured the BIOS. I then attempted to load Vista and, after initially looking promising, I heard a faint "squeal" from the PC and it rebooted. Any idea what the "squeal" might be?

On the very next attempt Vista loaded; albeit very slowly. My CPU and GPU temperatures both look fine (GPU is idling at 45 degrees now).

I'm worried that my Western Digital HD is on the way out (my boot drive). It's happened before (12+ months ago), and this drive is an RMA swap-out for that one.

What's the best way to test my HD, to determine if it's the cause of the problem?

 

[Daze]

Hmmm...

I've disabled the "USB 2.0 Controller" option in the BIOS and everything now appears to be working as before. This is strange... I haven't touched my bios in over 6 months. Why would this suddenly cause me problems now? I only disabled it because I found a post (good old Google) from someone else who experienced the same problem with Vista.

Very weird...

 

[!TIMMY!]

Thats weird, If you want to check the health of your HD:

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1

Data Lifeguard Tools is for you.

 

[Bal3Wolf]

id lay it on the wd refurb drives suck i had my 120 die and they replaced it the new drive died at 91 days 1 day after the 90 day warranty ran out the drive was rarely used to.

 

[Daze]

I still think it might be the HD. Unfortunately, the Western Digital's Data Lifeguard tool doesn't work in Vista! I've decided to drop back to XP when I build my next PC (in a week or so).

I think the "USB 2.0 Controller" BIOS change was a false alarm. I've a feeling my PC just happened to start working then by coincidence. I've since re-enabled it and Vista still loads fine.

What would be a good replacement SATA 2 drive (200Gb+ should suffice)?

I don't want another WD and I see Matrox have been bought out (I'm a bit behind the times).

 

[darkorb]

Seagate