Strange crashes recently

[norty303]

My PC is less than a year old based on a Gigabyte GA-7NN 400l mobo 2500XP Barton, 512mb Crucial ram, 120 gb 7200.7 8mb cache Barracuda containing Windows boot partition.

In the last couple of days its been just freezing solid. As it does it I hear a very small beep from the PC speaker then I have to reset or hard power off.

I have thought it might be the HD on the way out but I can't see where to turn on SMART in the BIOS (it may be a hidden option) to check. I'm going to download the Seagate diagnostics tonight to see if it'll tell me anything.

I did take the side off this morning as it had got so bad it wasn't getting thru the boot process. I pressed all of the IDE cables to make sure they were fully home and it booted ok. At that point i had to go to work.

Due to all of the crashes some files have become corrupt so a repair install of Windows is in order anyway. I'd like to think that it was a loose cable causing the problem and that would certainly be consistent with the corrupt files. Until i get a chance to fully try it tonight i won't know if that was the case

Does this sound familiar to anyone and if so what else might it be?

 

[norty303]

Sorry, i forgot to mention that there has been nothing strange reported in the event viewer so i don't think its a software problem. The beep from the speaker also points to hardware, its like it tries to beep but gets quickly cut off so you only hear a bit of the start of it

 

[miles57]

you might want to check the capaciters on the motherboard to see if any are raised or blown, i used to get this probelm on a batch of faulty boards i recieved.

also check your CPU fan is spinning easily spinnin and see if it feels stiff.

 

[norty303]

I've already inspected all of the fans to ensure free movement and they're ok (apart from the GPU fan which has seized so many times I've got bored freeing it - it's an old ATI 8500 so it doesn't run too warm anyway and it certainly would've made a fuss long before now)

The bios doesn't report CPU temp over 49c.

I've since found that CTRL - F1 should reveal the SMART enabling options so I can do that and I'll have a look at the Caps for leakage/bulging.