BSOD after HD swap

Any help I can get would be greatly appreciated.

My machine's 20 GB hard drive was reaching capacity, and despite not having any problems with it -- no BSOD, no dead/damaged clusters -- I decided I wanted some extra space. There was only 3 GB left in it and it was starting to lag a bit. So I bought an used 80 GB hard drive off eBay. I wanted to start fresh, so I backed up My Documents, unplugged the old HD, plugged the new one in, and did a fresh install of WinXP.

It worked fine for a day. Then, the troubles began.

The system begin to freeze and reboot suddenly. I disabled Auto Restart during recovery, switched to Safe Mode and then, of course, it was BSOD after BSOD. The Stop Messages were all different and never referenced any hardware or software. I ran SpyBot S&D and it didn't find anything. I tried running Ad-Aware 3 times and every time it scanned the registry, it caused the machine to reboot. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it, but I thought it was strange. I attempted to run Trend Micro HouseCall but could not keep the computer on long enough to finish the scan.

So, I did the 'convenient' thing and put my old hard drive back on.

And guess what? Now I'm getting BSODs with the OLD HD!! Sometimes I get one without even completing the boot process.

HELP!

 

I would check and double-check "all" of the connections inside the case. Not just the HDD connections, you might have knocked something loose.

Steve

 

Definitely sounds as if something is loose - a RAM chip would be by first choice.

 

I checked every cable and every connection. It didn't work. Now, every time I turn the computer on, there is an intermittent 3-beep every few seconds...

:cry

 

I think Yargwel is right, 3 Beeps "normally" means your memory is not passing the tests at startup. I would remove the memory stick(s) and re-seat them.

Steve