Home built system won't load

[meekers]

My computer has been running fine for a month. However, a couple hours ago it froze on me while I using it. Now I can not get it to restart. It freezes every time during the 'starting windows' screen.

I have tried safe mode, and that blue screened. Tried safe mode again and this time it froze on the welcome screen.

I have tried putting in the windows 7 dvd and that froze as well.



My Parts:
CASE NZXT| GAMA-001BK RT

VGA SAPPHIRE| 100253HDM HD4650 R

2Gx2|MUSHKIN 996586 R

PSU Antec|430W EA-430D GREEN RT

DVD BURNER SONY

HD 500G|SAMSUNG

CPU AMD|ATH II X3 450 3.2G AM3 RT

MB Biostar A770E3 770/SB710 R

 

[mosox]

Try with one stick of RAM at a time.

 

[T_T]

I have tried putting in the windows 7 dvd and that froze as well.

Have you checked your boot order to ensure you're booting from CD/DVD first?

Here are some other suggestions:

1. Move the HDD data cable (and I'm assuming it's SATA) to a different port
2. Try different SATA data cable
3. Run a quick SMART test on the HDD
4. To supplement mosox's tip, move the single RAM stick to another DIMM slot. Repeat until you've used all sticks in all slots. For example:

Stick 1:
| _ _ _
_ | _ _
_ _ | _
_ _ _|

Stick 2: repeat above for all sticks, regardless of successful boots into Windows, as you want to determine if there are bad RAM sticks or bad RAM slots.