It all started when I noticed that at extended loading screens for games (Newer games, such as BF2142) the loading screen would "hang" with repeating sound. Rebooting the computer fixed this issue up to a point- however, after a particularly bad series of crashes while loading, the computer wouldn't boot at all.
First, Windows would only get to the loading screen and eventually "hang" (freeze) there. (The blue bar would stop moving.)
After awhile I just determined that the Harddrive was corrupt and replaced it. After replacing the harddrive the computer worked fine booting up exactly twice. The next day when I went to start the computer, it Froze at the loading screen again.
For awhile, I thought I could sidestep this by entering the bios, or continuously rebooting in an attempt to make it work. (A friend of mine told me that it could be a BIOS issue, but the CMOS is still fine.)
I thought, at the time, that my power supply was failing, so I replaced it. Again the computer started fine exactly once, then froze on startup again. However, now I could boot it by some mysterious combination of either leaving the power supply off for awhile before booting, and entering/exiting the BIOS after booting. Usually it took 3 tries and 30 minutes to boot the computer.
Once in windows everything functioned fine with no noticable drop in performance.
Now, I've gone away for a week, leaving the entire system off, and when I return I can't get the computer to get past the loading screen regardless.
Either the computer will freeze after about 5 minutes of "Loading Windows", or it will Load Windows for awhile, then the screen will go black. Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem? This all spontaniously started after a crash, and the same problem has persisted through 2 different harddrives, Power supplies, and a fresh installation of windows.
Specs:
ABIT An8 SLI Motherboard
AMD 64b 4000+
Corsair XMS DDR 2 gig Ram
Seagate Barracuda 250 gig SATA drive
BFG GeForce 7800 GTX 256Ram
Audigy 2 ZS
Rosewill 600w modular power supply. (Upgraded from a 550 Antec after problems started)