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I started having trouble booting the computer a few weeks ago. I would turn the computer on but it wouldn't boot. I would turn it off and try again and again. Sometimes the drive would spin up and other times it didn't. It would take me a few tries and it would finally start. Other days it would start on the first try. It took about half an hour to get it booted a couple days ago so I thought the hard drive was going. I backed up everything and bought a new Maxtor drive. I installed it and copied everything over from the old drive to the new drive using the Maxtor software and I didn't have to install anything on the new drive. It started up fine for a couple days but I went to start it today and it has the same problem as the old drive. It took me another couple times to get it started. I checked for a virus on the old and new drive but didn't find any. I ran checkdisk today on the new drive and it said it was deleting corrupt attribute record 128. The program finished running and that was all it said and windows started. Would that cause the computer not to boot all the time? Maybe I should format the new drive and install everything again or should I use the recovery disks and try that. The computer is a Gateway 5200. Is there anything else I can try?
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System Faults:
Motherboard fails to POST.
Memory Test Fails.
System randomly and/or constantly reboots itself.
Fails to fully boot (or even install) Operating System.
System randomly and frequently freezes.
Random & frequent 'Blue Screens of Death'
BSoD or hard freeze under heavy drive activity (Either RAID, SCSI, or standard ATA)
CPU temps abnormally higher than usual under typical or less load.
CPU VCORE & other system voltages are erratic or far out of tolerances.
Resetting the system after a freeze and the system will not repost. (You have to completely power down then power back up.)
It doesn't even get to the screen that says Gateway. Nothing comes on the screen at all. The drive spins like it is trying to boot but I get nothing. I hooked the monitor up to another computer to make sure it works and it isn't the monitor either.
Thanks for the help. The computer wouldn't start again today. The drive was spinning and making the noise like it was going to start up but nothing happened. I finally got it started after six tries. Since I coppied the entire old drive onto the new one and the new one is doing the same thing I guess my next step is to format the new drive and install everything again. Then if it starts acting up again I will know it is not the drives. I will then have some idea of where to start looking for problems.
