Hi, I am writing this on my wife's pc. I was on my system Saturday when I heard clicks and saw that the hard drive light was flashing. I was in the midst of typing a post on a forum when everything froze. At that point, I restreted the system and the blue screen appeared. I restarted and then it booted up ok. I went into Outlook, but it woud not open. I tried Healp and search and it would not open. In both, I got a message that said to send or not to send the error report to Microsoft. I tried going into system information, and that too would not open. I tried a system restore and restored it to last Thursday when the system worked fine, but the problems persisted. I tried an XP repair, restored the files, but that didn't work. Finally, I formatted and now the PC will come up in Safe Mode, but it will not come up when I start windows normally. I am able to get into the bios. I don't know if this is a hard drive issue or a system issue. Are there any tests that I can perform? Thanks, Veets

Sectors on an HDD can get damaged if HDD is working during a crash. Try this to find and fix-- http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... How to Perform Disk Error Checking in Windows XP

Were the clicks that you heard coming from the speakers or from the computer itself? If it came from the computer itself, have you heard the noise before? Your hard drive is probably hosed. Sometimes they will sorta work anyway, but after they click, they can give out at any time. WinSimple Software

Hi, I just swapped out the drive and installed a new Seagate 500 gig drive. I formatted and installed XP. The system is not botting up. It's doing the same thing it did when I thought it was the HD I previously had installed. Does anyone think that the motherboard might be the issue? I don't know what else it might be. Thanks, Veets

What does it do when you say XP won't start up normally? Any errors or anything? WinSimple Software