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Hi, thanks in advance for taking a look at what i've got to say. I'm new to this forum but have posted elsewhere on the same problem to no avail.

While gaming, my PC suddenly locked up and had to be reset. In the post, upon rebooting, i was notified that BIOS settings had been defaulted so i went back in and set them all back to their proper configuration.

Anyway, saved changes and exited to receive an audio message (i have an asus nForce board and it does this normally) that my CPU fan test had failed, yet upon inspection the device was working fine. I not only checked the fan rpm and temps in bios after this but opened up my case and had a look... no apparent issues.

I then restarted again to find that the machine locked up at the WinXP loading screen at the same time making a sound i'd never heard before. A Click, then a sort of powering up sound like the whine a cd drive makes when beginning to read a disk but much at much higher speed and pitch *difficult to explain*. It continued over and over again at about 8-15 second intervals until i again reset the machine. I immediately thought that it must be the fan failing but upon inspection it was not.

This time around i booted in safe mode and managed to get into windows and to all diagnostic tools all components appeared normal. cpu temps, voltages, fan rpm, hdd etc. but the same sound as described earlier continued, except when there was no activity on the computer at all... checked the cpu activity in task manager and when absolutely nothing was going on the sound stopped but as soon as i moved the mouse to close task manager it began again.

Anyway, i shut down the PC and attempt to boot normally but it continually locks up at the winxp loading screen with the same sound as described earlier, unless booted in safe mode.

If anybody has any insight as to a possible problem or fix i would much appreciate the imput

Hey cjem,

Welcome to PCHF!

After browsing the net this seems a common problem with Asus boards. One of the commone fixes, is to swap you RAM around. A-B, B-A. For some reason, this tends to work most of the time. If not, post back and we'll look at some other possibilities.

Hope this helps.

thanks for your reply. as you asked, i switched the ram around in every possible configuration and even tried single sticks in single channel mode but it didnt make any apparent difference. Same symptoms persist.

i'm gunna add my system specs in this post.

Asus A7N8X-Deluxe w/nForce2
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ thoroughbred
DTC Cooler Master pro lateral cyclic unit
1Gb Kingston HyperX PC3000 (2x512)
ATI Radeon 9700 pro 128mb
Western Digital 120Gb HDD
Antec Sonata w/ antec 350wt psu
Liteon 52/24/52+dvd combo drive
WinXP pro sp1

A friend of mine said possibly a power supply problem after i gave him a quick rundown on the symptoms, so i am going to try switching it out for another one i have laying around.

as a follow up to my last post, the PSU was not an issue, switched it out with another and still continued to get the same symptoms. However, upon putting the original psu back i was able to boot in safe mode and then return the pc to the last known workable config which worked this time for some reason... this is turning into a giant wtf. :o

Hya Cjem , im afraid that im pretty sure that youre HD is the problem and that it has had it. Have a listen where that sound is coming from , im almost sure it will be the HD.

If you still have access to youre files on there , then i would backup everything immediately and replace the HD.

thanks for the reply joe5, the sound i heard was not coming from the hdd; i'm not sure where it was coming from. but, listen to this...

Just now i managed to boot with last known working config without it locking up, as it was, and was able to get into windows and operate normally without the sound i described in my above post happening at all. So far so good...

Besides having to update directX etc. as apparently the last known working date was some time in August, everything seems to be working properly now. It's a head scratcher. Even though everything is currently working okay I still believe there is an underlying hardware problem issue maybe a faulty chipset or hdd controller? would those problems present in such a manner?

Oke cjem, keep us informed about your situation.
Had you made any changes before it started to happen?