PC freezes for 2 min, HDD light solid, mouse still moves, clock stops

lehnerus2000 said:

Have you tried booting your PC with the DVD drive disconnected?

I had a problem with a dodgy power connector on one of my DVD drives (on the power cable).
It caused boot problems on my PC.

tried that just now, still the same error

I had an old IDE drive connected, and since the Event Viewer error referred to an Ide Port, I disconnected it and still got errors

I have the main HDD on SATA port 1, I had the DVD on port 2, then moved it to port 3 when I started noticing the error.

sounds to me like a controller on the motherboard is going; or in one case on my own PC a channel on the power supply wasn't feeding enough voltage (says my multimeter). So bits of the MB would have had enough power whilst others didn't, so replacing the power supply was enough - luckily the MB survived it happily. I wouldn't try the reinstall from scratch thing until you've verified what you can about the hardware. Try the usual fixes - place the power supply, unseat reseat all the components you can (incl. cpu - power pc on without cpu, then off, then replace cpu - that'll reset the MB/Bios and any crazy charges left in it).

never thought of the power supply, but it is possible

I'll try that tomorrow, I think I have a spare PS

You need to get the good ISO from the tutorial on to a dvd and install windows. Your image could have easily gotten corrupted if it`s that old.

When you say things like " from scratch " and " a fresh install " that tells us you`re doing a clean install. An image is not a clean install, but I think you now know that.

If this is a new hard drive, what have you got to loose ? If you have your key do a CLEAN INSTALL as per the tutorial. Even if you don`t have a key, do it to see if your image is the problem.

Frumbert, I think you hit it head on

I replaced the power supply, and after 3 hours no more errors or freeze ups (so far), I even copied a music CD; using the CD/DVD burner always caused atapi and disk errors, none this time

Funny thing is, I recently replaced a power supply that had a noisy fan, it seems the one I replaced it with is bad! So now I'm using the noisy but good power supply.

Thanks Frumbert

frumbert said:

sounds to me like a controller on the motherboard is going; or in one case on my own PC a channel on the power supply wasn't feeding enough voltage (says my multimeter). So bits of the MB would have had enough power whilst others didn't, so replacing the power supply was enough - luckily the MB survived it happily. I wouldn't try the reinstall from scratch thing until you've verified what you can about the hardware. Try the usual fixes - place the power supply, unseat reseat all the components you can (incl. cpu - power pc on without cpu, then off, then replace cpu - that'll reset the MB/Bios and any crazy charges left in it).