Windows XP Freezes on Startup

[Pcmiztress]

I have an a8n-sli asus dual core motherboard that i recently replaced the fan on. Since then I have experienced some problems. Its been 3 weeks since I replaced the fan and on 3 occasions I have had my computer lock up. When I go to restart it, it will lock up on the windows welcome screen and after about 4-6 times restarting it will start up fine. The last occasion when I restarted it didn't recognize my 600gig hard drive. I have never had this problem before. My system was custom built by a friend of mine 4 years ago and has been working smoothly ever since. 3 months ago a hard drive died and I took off xp 64 bit and installed xp 32 bit home edition. Everything was running great until the fan was istalled. Anyone have any clue what happened? I've checked my temperatures and fan speed. Fan goes up to 2000 rpm and the CPU temp ranges from 35 - 47 degrees Celsius, and the M/B temp gets up to about 32 degrees Celsuis. So its not over heating. ...

Thanks! :confused:

[Paul Komski]

I doubt its fan or heat related. More likely to be hard drive related since this was not recognized on one occasion. Double check (?? SATA or IDE) both the power and data cables and even consider replacing them with new ones.

You can of course try checking the HDD with its maker's diagnostics or with HDTune (http://www.hdtune.com/). If the HDD is intrinsically OK then intermittent power via a loose connection or a poor power supply would be considerations.

To help discriminate between the OS (or other software) and the hardware you could try booting to a Linux Live CD such as Knoppix, Ubuntu, Puppy, etc (http://paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1813#LiveCDs) and see if the box boots up without freezing. You could do this both with and without the HDD attached to help discriminate.

[sassie05]

Question: Why did you replace the fan? Heatsink Fan?