I have a pentium 866 PC running Windows XP. Multiple times throughout the day XP will freeze causing us to reboot the machine. Upon reboot it usually will not detect the hardrive and will report a system boot disk error. It seems that if we leave the computer for a few hours it will restart and operate normally, but eventually the same scenario will play out again. The hard drive has been chirping and clunking so in conjunction with a tech we determined that the drive was on it's way out. Last night we purchased another drive installed it, ghosted the old drive (which did have bad sectors) to the new one and re-booted. Everything seem to work fine while the tech was there. XP worked, no lost data, XP reconized and showed me both the new drive (primary) and the old drive (slave). After the tech left (with $100. of my dollars) my goal was to format the slave and just leave it in there to store the kids music files on. Well windows froze up on me and when I rebooted, system disk failure! Upon further reboots, I did get windows to come back up, but it no longer reconized the slave drive. I have had multiple virus issues in the past but McAfee (full version) is not picking up anything on the PC right now. My plan for tonight will be to remove the slave and see how the PC works then. My question is am I heading down the right path here? Could it be something else? A controller? Registry entries? I don't know. Thanks in advance for your replies.

bill, did the computer come with windows xp preloaded? It sounds like the tech copied the old hard disk to the new one. The software on the old disk may have been corrupted. I think it would be your best bet to format your new drive, and then reinstall windows cleanly. Afterwards, you can copy your old data from the old drive (assuming its still hanging in there). After all is done, windows should run a little smoother and fix your frequent freezing problem.

Could be an over heating problem. Remove the case cover and run the computer with the cover off for a while. If the computer runs ok with the cover off then it's most likely a heat problem in which case you would need to install more fans in the case.

it also can be flaky ram or power supply giving up