Dangers of overclocking, can I do it without any risk?

[Penoir]

Hello all. I'm planning on buying myself a new computer within the next few months and I had a couple of questions regarding overclocking it. I'm currently on an underclocked Athlon XP 1800+ that was salvaged from a friends dead computer (damn KS75A won't post when I set the FSB to 133mhz for some reason), and this will be my first new computer in quite some time. I plan on spending a relatively large chunk of money on it, around 1500 or so, and I plan on having this computer last several years at least.

My current plan was to get the following as the core of the system

Nforce4 motherboard, preferably Asus depending on how they are
Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester
1GB Corsair PC3200 XL
GeForce 6800/Ati X800 depending on pricing
74 gig raptor
300 gig new maxtor sata II drive for storage

Anyway, would I be able to overclock this to a good degree without the risk of screwing anything up? I don't want to do anything that will carry the risk blowing up a bunch of equipment. I'd like to get at least 2.2 ghz out of the CPU on stock cooling, and I'm hoping for 2.4 or so. Are these realistic goals at stock voltage?

Also, is there any chance of damaging the hard drives from overclocking? I've read about data corruption when overclocking without pci/agp locks, but can the drives actually become damaged or do you just have to reformat them? Also, I've read that SATA drives are more difficult to overclock with than PATA drives when doing FSB overclocking. Am I better off just using PATA for now?

I don't plan on overclocking the video card right now, so basically, can I get away with overclocking this and not have any chance of anything frying, or is there always a chance? Am I better off just getting a 3400+ and leaving it at stock?

Thank you for your time, and I apologize if this has been a poorly constructed post. I haven't had a lot of sleep this week.

 

[VIAN]

There is always a risk. It would be smart for you to try it on your POS system before going out an buying an expensive OC system.

KS75A Sucks monkey balls - my first mobo apart from my first comp, dell.

I wouldn't know with stock cooling, but usually OCing is more beneficiary with nonstock coolers. Stock coolers are usually made for just the right amount of heat and no more than the processor at stock would at worst produce.

No way of damaging the HDD from OCing, unless you light a fire, in extreme situtations, and then the HDD might get burned that way.
Your mobo has a PCI/AGP lock so no worries.
Never heard of HDD's affecting OC. Might want to wait for another opinion to be certain.

The key to Ocing is patience. If you're gonna be stupid and feed it too much voltage all at once and not shut the comp off if it freezes then, it might fry something. A lot of patience is needed to OC. It may take days of just stress testing and stuff and troubleshooting.