My system (see below) has run fine for about the first six months of its life with heavy use. Around a month ago I had some odd problems where the system would lock up when I ran the anti virus and explorer.exe would crash. Despite me trying numerous suggestions from eggxperts in a different thread, this issue seemed to go away by itself.

After a few weeks of moderate to heavy use (3 hour gaming sessions) with no issues at all, I all of sudden would get BSOD's immediately after boot up (this happened on two occasions, one shortly after the other). I did a system restore both times and that seemed to do the trick.

After a few more weeks of similar use with no problemsat all my sytsem will no longer boot at all. It feezes on the XP "blue bar" screen and will not move past that. I tried to start the system in safe mode and it won't do that either.

Has anyone ever seen this happen? Do I have any option's available or am I stuck with having to do a new install and face the headache of re-installing all of my apps and games?

Any insight is appreciated - thanks.


Intel Core 2 Duo E4300, Artic Cooler 7 CPU fan
MSI P6N SLI Mobo 2 Gigs G-Skill Ram PC6200
MSI 8800gts 640mb OC'd
Lite On 20x DVD burner
WD Raptor 10k 150gig Seagate 7.2k 500gig
PC Power and Cooling 750watt psu
NEXT ZERO full tower case (7 120mm case fans)
Windows XP Pro

When was the last time you set up the memory voltage and timings in BIOS.

I haven't changed the the voltage or timings on the memory. I have oc'd the cpu a bit awile ago but ended up changing back to default settings after I first noticed the lock up issue.

Set the memory voltage to 2.0- 2.1v and timings to Mfg. specs (5-5-5-15 or 4-4-4-12) (You mean PC6400, not PC6200 like you posted). Set up the memory correctly in BIOS. Run memtest 86 and check for errors. If necessary, check each DIMM individually in slot 1.

Make a bootable CD here and run memtest86.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Ultimate_Boot_CD_d4981.html

I will give it a shot and post back - thanks

I'm back home and have had some time to play around with my system.
Here is everything I came up with:

Checked all connections inside and everything was fine.

Made sure memory was at stock settings in BIOS. I ran memtest 86 through twice and there were no memory problems.

I went in through win xp recovery console and ran CHKDSK at the DOS prompt. I got the message "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." Does this mean that the hard drive is corrupted or just the os? Either way I guess I am stuck doing a fresh install.

Any other ideas?

Keep running chkdsk (using the /p/r options) from the recovery console until there are no errors and then try booting Windows.

Grumpy

Thanks, unfortuneately I will have to wait until I get home from work again.

I tried running chkdsk through a number of times but I still get the same error message.

I tried everything I could with no luck. I finally sucked it up and decided to just do a fresh install. I have reformatted the drive and re-installed Windows XP. As I started the process of re-installing the apps the system eventually runs into the same problem. It will freeze up again and if I reboot it will go to the XP boot up screen and then it will go black and nothing happens. I have run through the install process three times with similar results.

Does this mean the hard drive is definitely physically corrupt? Wouldn't Windows noticed this when I reformatted the drive? Could it possibly something wrong with the Mobo? I would like to be able to isolate the problem for sure before I go out and spend any money on hardware.

Thanks for all the help.

Does this happen just after installing XP or after installing an app?

Grumpy

I usually get through loading the drivers for the mobo and graphics card and downloading a firewall and anti virus. The most recent time it crashed was trying to install nero. The time before it crashed when installing sp2 for xp. The first time I think was after rebooting after the drivers, so it is not failing after any particular app or driver. After the most recent time I ran chkdsk/r and it said it found and fixed errors. I ran it through again to make sure it did not get any errors but when I exited and tried to reboot it still didn't work. The furthest I seem to get is after the xp load screen I will get a black screen with the hourglass which I can control with mouse but it never displays the desktop.

If you have any other RAM available, try it.

Would don't you slipstream SP2 into your Windows XP CD? Run diags on memory and hard drive.

Grumpy