Doesn't Boot up, Solid HD Light

[jimbonewbie]

My system has been working great for months, and one day it just froze up and I rebooted and it loaded up real slowly (10min). Then I got a blue screen and it rebooted. I have a clone of my OS drive which I use to restore my system if all else fails. My cloned drive is fully updated and all so all I have to do is use a program like disc copy to do a bit for bit copy to restore it to that date. When my main drive stopped booting up I tried my back up clone drive and the same thing, get a post HDD light flashes a bit then goes solid.

Where should I start. I have also tried to boot from CD and the same thing posts then goes to a black screen, after the windows logo shows up. with both the onboard and my 9600GT. Someone suggested it might be the SATA controller but I would not know how to test for that. Here is my system in a nutshell

ASUS P5QEM-DO uATX board
E4500 OC'd to 2.54 fsb@225
9600GT
4gb RAM

 

[marco324]

did you try a windows repair with your windows cd
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=windows+repair&aq=4&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=windows+re&gs_rfai=&fp=467c3568f2eec009

 

[jimbonewbie]

Yes tried to boot to the vista CD and I get the logo and then the screen goes black and the HDD light stays on solid. I have tested the memory with memtest 86+, and tested the HD with seatools from bootable CD's and they test fine.

 

[marco324]

did you check your tempatures heatsink on good

 

[jimbonewbie]

Yeah I can get into the bios settings and it reports temp as 37 Celcius.

 

[jimbonewbie]

Made some progress, can boot from the windows cd now but when I get to the installation part, both the formatting of the drive seems slower than usual. Also when it gets where windows copies files to the HD it seems slow. After a few minutes the DVD drive stops spinning, its like it gives up copying files cause the progress meter stays at 0%. Checking the drives with seatools again

 

[jimbonewbie]

Finished checking the 2 drives in question and I guess they failed 2 twice each and passed once each. So I would assume 1 fail is reason to RMA the drives.

 

[marco324]

yea sh*t