Is this problem hard drive related? Need help please.

Hey guys, my computer was having a serious overheating issue over the summer, it kept shuting it self down whenever I play games. When the weather was extremely hot, I was literally playing games for 5 mins-->comouter automatically shut down-->restart computer-->play game for another min or two and computer shut down again and I repeated this process for a long time before I finally gave up and bought a cooling fan.

So the overheating issue was fixed but another problem came after that. I noticed that my computer started to take unusual amount of time to start up. It just kept stucking on the Windows XP loading screen for 5-10 mins and often it went back to restarting the boot process and I get this Windows XP failed to boot last time error message. Although this problem is not as frequent as it was, but I still get this problem from time to time and it only started after overheating issue.

I believe it was the extensive system shut down and restart that I did over the summer which caused some hardware problem but I'm not sure if it is the hard drive. Does anybody have any clue? Thank you so much!

You may want to check the event viewer under Administrative Tools (in the Control Panel) to see what kind (if any errors) exist in either the Application or System views. If you see any with a RED DOT with a X in it, take note of what they say and post them. If there's a hard-drive issue, you will see something like "IO ERROR" or "ERROR WRITING/READING FROM HARDDISK..." If you see something like these errors, your hard-drive is going south and will need to be replaced. Since your system was crashing as much as you stated, there's a good chance you may have some corrupted files on the hard-drive. You may want to run SCANDISK to check for hard-disk media issues and to recover lost data from bad sectors. You also would want to do this: insert your XP installer DVD in the DVD drive, open-up a command window (type: CMD) (using the START, RUN menus) in Windows and type-in this: SFC /SCANNOW . There's a space between the word "SFC" and the forward slash "/". This will cause the Protected File System scan to run and check for any bad or missing system files. If there are any you will see the system access the DVD. Hopefully this will help you find out what's going on and to resolve your issues. Let me know on your next post.