Pc will get to startup screen then freeze?

[Sirrion]

For the past few days now, seemingly out of the blue, when I turn on my computer, the Boot screen (displaying my CPU, RAM, HDDs, ESC to enter Boot mode, DEL to enter Setup, etc) will display and then my computer will freeze. I cannot enter the Setup screen or boot-up screen when it freezes.

It's supposed to obviously just go right past this and go into Windows XP. I have to reset my computer anywhere between 3-6 times before it will boot properly.

On one of the resets I saw something about a CPU error, but all my equipment runs at stock speed, and my CPU runs at 31-32 Degrees Celcius. I don't nor have i overclocked.

I feel like my computer is slowly dying, can someone throw out what could be the problem?

LANPARTY DFI N4 Ultra Mobo
Athlon 64 3700 Cpu
Evga 7800 gts with latest Nvidia drivers
2g PC3200 OCZ PLat Rev 2
WD 76g hdd
Windows XP with all the latest updates.
Creative Labs Audigy 2

I haven't checked by bios updates in sometime, but this problem jumped out of nowhere. My system has not had problems in the 1 - 1.5 years ive had it, until now. I have not changed anything except my Monitor in the past 6 months (from 19" Viewsonic to 24" LG)

Any thoughts or ideas?

 

[dbailey]

Probably not the case, but make sure you don't have any random usb devices plugged in- like a thumb drive... this has been the case for me on a few occasions. What is the boot order of your devices in the bios?

 

[Sirrion]

Boot Order is: Removeable Device >HDD>CD-ROM>Nothing

I even changed the Removeable Device to HDD so it was: HDD>HDD>CD-Rom

But that didn't appear to fix the issue either. and I've been running nearly a year trouble free with this setup.

 

[dbailey]

Your hard drive might be dying. Backup your stuff asap. Do you have another hard drive you could ghost this one to? I would do a ghost disk>disk and then use the other drive as your c: drive. If the problem is gone, then you know that other hard drive was crashing. If you don't, then download the manufacturers hard drive diagnostic utility and check the drive. If it passes fine, you may just need to re-install windows to solve this issue.

 

[travisray2004]

This may be good news, then again it could be,

My motherboard died on me, and it seems like i couldnt even get past the boot up screen, then i would reboot to get into the cmos, then it would lock up, I rebooted it again, and it didnt even turn on. I think my fired from overheating issues. Because of the night before when i was re-encoding a video for dvd format. Anyways, tried a different motherboard, and is working fine now.

 

[Sirrion]

Well I can get past the boot up screen, but sometimes it takes 1 shot and other times it takes multiple tries. Tonight it worked on first shot, but said "CMOS BACKUP!" which it only usually states that when i change the Bios settings (Even though i have not changed it recently).

I'll take the advice about the HDD and try to transfer the data over asap. Is there a good way to do this? Should i go through software? If yes, whats the best kind?