I have just recently bought and upgraded my cpu and motherboard to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and the Asus Socket AM2 Crosshair M-board. I installed the parts myself, when i went to boot up, it didn't load windows, fine, i can deal with that, I reinstalled windows and booted up. The next morning my computer wouldnt turn on. The power supply had burned out i found probably because of the wattage taken from the new cpu was a big leap from my previous P4 2.8GHz. I replaced the power supply and everything was fine, however now i have a unique problem. Whenever I put a significant load onto my secondary hard drive, explorer.exe freezes. I can exit other programs just fine, but the window accessing the drive is completely frozen, I can't even open the task manager. Also, i noticed that my HDD LED is blinking at a constant rate. Could this be a hard drive failure? If so, is there a reason for all these sudden failures?

Hi Woodsballer,

Welcome to PCHF.

Yes, you would have needed to reinstall your OS after upgrading your hardware. This is true of any significant hardware change.

All your problems since could well be a result of an inadequate power supply. You can calculate how much power you need here:

eXtreme Power Supply Calculator - What Power Supply Do I Need

My recommended wattage is 400W my old psu was a 500W my new one that i just got is 680W. So according to that link, i have more then enough power. Thanks anyway.

Hi Woods, check the temperature of your HDD. If it was due to HDD failure, it would normally be random, not when your disk is under pressure. Try this utility before you go out and buy a replacement HDD:

HDD Temperature (Hard drive failure prediction, estimate hard drive life software - PalickSoft website <http://www.siguardian.com/>)
The possibility of a crash of your HDD doubles at 40°c and quadruples at 55°c!

Both of my HDD's are at a steady 24 degrees Celsius. I have also noticed that its not only when a window is accessing my secondary drive, it locks up on random. I have a hard drive IDE and my secondary is a SATA the IDE is master . Would this have an effect?

Woodsballer, nope that's fine. The only other thing I can think of to rule out it being a HDD problem, it the cable or IDE controller. Try a different cable on the secondary IDE port on the motherboard.

maybe the sata cable.
Found this comment over on newegg...


Great SATA Cables

Reviewed By: N/A on 5/22/2006

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 month to 1 year



Pros: If you just bought a new motherboard (especially Asus) I suggest using these cables. They work flawlessly.
Cons: None really.
Other Thoughts: I bought an Asus A8V-Deluxe a year ago and after a month or so my system would pause when performing tasks or gaming. The pauses were brief and I started to suspect my hard drive was going to fail.So to rule out the hard drive I changes the SATA cables with another bundled with my motherboard and all was well. To make a long story short, the Asus SATA cables were worthless. They only lasted a couple weeks until they would lose integrity. All 4 were like this. Buying these Orion cables solved my problem.