My problem started this afternoon when my Pc completely froze up. The screen was frozen still and the last 2 seconds of audio was playing over and over again. I hit close programs then end now when the not responding boxes popped up, half an hour later still frozen so I switched off at the wall socket. When I turned back on everything seems to load fine until the loading screen comes up, I hear the power cut out and the pc's restarting. Anyway I go on to try and start the comp in 'last known good configuration' doesn't work, safe mode, safe mode with command prompt blah blah blah, none of them work. After around 4 hours of bright ideas, and head scratching I gave in and decided to reformat, that didn't work either, Bios loaded fine for me to change the boot order to cd first, I boot from disk, but then when I try any of the options on the next screen, ie. install, repair, format. The next screen is a lengthy error message, something about windows was shut down to protect my pc. Anyways after some googling I managed to get an old 40gb hard drive running from out of the attic, which is running as well as an 8 year old hd can. I am desperately trying now to rescue the blown hd. But have no clue what to try next. Please Help.

It's probably not wise to try and rescue the drive as it may be mechanically faulty and therefore unreliable (and unrepairable). However if their is data on it you want to try and rescue, fit is as a slave drive and see if Windows will read from it. After you've got stuff off it, destroy it to make sure no-one else can read from it.

I tried to fit my broken sata drive as a slave with an old IDE as master, Its just not working, When I change the bios to boot from the IDE it still Boots from sata, I changed the boot up so that I had to select which drive to boot from each time and it seems to boot from IDE but restarts over and over again. I got online yesterday and ordered an external usb sata drive enclosure and I'm praying that that's gonna help. In the meantime, while I'm running my pc with this terrible old 40gb hd, My usb's have disappeared. I checked inside the pc and everythings connected ok. They're just not being detected, so now I'm stuck with an awful clicky old ps2 keyboard aswell. HELP ME PLEASE!!

try going in your bios and make the sata drive NOT bootable...
FYI...you don't actually set a sata as a slave drive...all sata drives are on their own connector

Aha, Now that explains why it kept coming up as master 1 and master 2. Thankyou so Much, I'm going to try that tonight.
Oh Yea, just to make myself look a bit 'stupider' My Usb's were disabled in the bios. *cough cough*

Everything failed and I threw my hard drive in the dustbin. I'm still running the trusty but slow old 40gb ide drive but I'm worried. All the errors I was experiencing before the sata drive died are still happening, whenever i run anything that uses a lot of memory the pc loses power at random times, not just restarts but like someone unplugged the tower (99% of the time while running there.com) When the blue screen of death appeared with the same 'memory read write' error message that the dead sata drive was giving i thought maybe its the ram and so I upgraded to a new pair of matching 1gb sticks. Assuming all was fixed earlier today I was running there.com again and got an avg bubble appear from the taskbar saying there.exe/?/?/something dds.png is corrupt and unreadable. so I ran avg virus scan which found nothing it is the free version. I do have an active mcafee subscription so i logged in at the mcafee site and ran online virus scan there. still found nothing, not even tracking cookies. I'm completely stumped and don't know what to do.

The old HD, did you format and installed XP or did you attach it as is into the failed computer? If you didn't, please do this. If you did, then there is something wrong with the hardware. Since you changed the ram then we should consider this as clear. The first thing I would try is to look in the attic for an old power supply unit and try to repalce the one inside the computer. Faulty or marginal psu can give you the most unexpected troubles.

Also, you the following instructions to download and run Sandra XII which is probably the best, free, diagnostic tool:

How to create a Sandra XII report.

Important Note: Sandra, like all computer test programs, stresses computer components beyond the average use. This is necessary to discover weaknesses in the system. On the other hand, if the system is in a marginal state a permanent failure of components may occur . Before running the program make sure to save any unsaved data.

Download Sandra XII using the link in my signature. Please note that if you run XP 64 you need a different version of Sandra then when using XP 32. Install and run the program.

Click on Tools and then on Create Report
. Follow the instructions and when given the option uncheck everything which you do not need to test. Choose a place in which to save the report. The report can be very long and complex so do not attach it to your post unless specifically asked to do so.

Run the program. The test is quite long. On my computer just testing the hardware takes about 40 minutes. At the top righthand corner there is an idicator that shows that the test is running. At the end look at the report on the screen and report items which did not pass the test successfully.