Fixing a pc for a friend, it hangs after the XP loading screen at a black screen. OCZ 500w PSU GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 Core2Duo e6300 7200LE OCZ 4gb 6400 (2x2gb) 250gb Sata Drive Tried safe mode with no luck so I went for a fresh install of XP and this was running fine all day yesterday with multiple reboots and today I turned the PC on and its now back to the same problem of hanging a black screen after the loading screen. I unplugged the IDE DVD drive, PCI card and tried to boot with each stick of RAM in turn, i've also reset the CMOS just encase. so im pretty sure it's down to the motherboard, cpu or HDD and im inclined to go with the HDD but I don't want to tell my friend he needs a new one if this isn't the problem. I don't want to be swapping motherboard and CPUs to test these so is there any way that I can find out whats at fault? Thanks for reading.
do a hard drive diagnostics test. best way is to plug the HDD into another working computer and do it from within windows.
rebooting can mean that you have a problem with memory. try with only 1 stick or change to different memory brand just for testing.
Could be a couple of things off the top of my head: In safe mode, take the display resolution down a notch or two and ensure the refresh rate is 59 or 60. If your monitor is a tube rather than a flat screen, it may very well be capable of more than 60hz refresh, but it may have been set too high - resetting this for the moment may let you at least boot normally and set it to a level that the monitor is happy with. And/Or.. In safe mode, uninstall the gfx drivers, reboot and then after booting normally, try reinstalling gfx drivers (or even d/l a newer version, if available).
It sounds to me like a hdd problem. Do you have a bootable CD to boot from - useful for system hdd diagnostics. Try Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows http://www.ubcd4win.com/- you will have to build it yourself from your XP disk but it'll come in handy down the line for all sorts of reasons. The XP disk has a repair option too that usually solves most XP boot issues but it will repair your current situation, not stop it happening again, and again etc. You don't want to have to keep repairing every few days! I had something similar happen and it wasn't actually the physical hdd but file corruption due to a dodgy printer driver.
