Computer froze, now won't boot

I was just browsing the internet, when my computer froze. It completely froze, the mouse wouldn't even move on the screen. I waited a minute or so, and hit the reset button on the front of my computer. It was starting up, and right before the Windows XP screen usually comes up, it restarted itself. The "Your computer did not start up correctly. Would you like to boot in... Safe mode? etc." screen came up, and I selected boot normally. It did an extra beep, then reset itself immediately, and the same screen came up. I tried safe mode, and it reset itself once again. No matter what I tried, safe mode, last good configuration, anything, it would just reset itself. I can access the BIOS.

Previously, when I started my computer, sometimes it would just hang at a black screen with a flashing line in the upper left, and would only proceed in the boot process when i ejected one of my CD-Rom drives (no idea why). Could that somehow be linked to this? I tried setting that CD-Rom below the hard drive in the boot order, just to see if that could have been causing it, but the same thing happens.

Also, about the freeze that happened just before everything died... I got an iPod for christmas, and installed iTunes on my computer. About 1 in 10 times that I started iTunes, my computer would freeze as I mentioned earlier in this post, but it would start up fine when I reset it. The time that it froze before it died, I wasn't starting iTunes and didn't even have it running, though. The reason that I mention this is because I can't ever remember having these irrecoverable freezes before I installed iTunes.

I tried accessing the recovery console from the XP CD, but when I do, I either get a BSOD that says

Code:

    A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down 
to prevent damage to your computer.

(some meaningless information)

    Technical Information
***  Stop: 0x00000024 (0x001902FA, 0xF7CAE8FC, 0xF7CAE5FC, 0xF748E84F)

***         ntfs.sys - Address F748E84F base at F7447000  DateStamp 3d6de5c1

Or, it just says "WIndows recovery console, helps you fix stuff, etc," but with no cursor and even after letting it sit like that for a half hour, I can't type anything.

I downloaded a MS-Dos boot disk, and tried to run chkdsk on C: with it, but it said "Invalid drive specified" for my C: or any other drives. So, I guess it stopped recognizing my hard drives?

I also downloaded memtest-86 and ran it, it found 28 errors on test 5 but 0 errors on all other tests.

I've got an Athlon 64 3200+ on an Asus K8N (I think, heh. I know for sure it's Asus, anyway.) motherboard, and a Radeon 9800 Pro.

Thanks in advance for helping.

 

I just downloaded ultimate boot CD, burned that to a CD, and ran it. The menu loaded fine, but I couldn't really run any of the programs on it. A few of the programs I tried to run were TestDisk 5.7, MBRtool 2.2.110, Partition Saving, and a couple of the anti-viruses. All of those gave me this error:

Code:

  -InitDisk
Divide error, stack:
0CFD ECCD 0A07 1123 0C70 9D65 0001 4200 0000 0281 0000 0087 0002
dos mem corrupt, first_mcb = 0000

PANIC: MCB chain corrupted
System halted

A few of the hard drive programs that I tried running, Seagate DiskWizard, Maxtor Maxblast, looked like they were loading, but then froze at

Code:

Starting Caldera DR-DOS...

And since I can't edit my original post...
I'm using Windows XP Pro, and I have a 250gb Western Digital and a 200gb WD hard drive, sorry for not saying this earlier.

 

Bump

 

hopefully your case won't be as severe, but I had to replace my hard drive when my Vaio PCG-K23 started freezing up with error messages very similar to what you described. Fortunately for me, was still under warranty at the time.

 

Damn, I hope it isn't that bad. I don't think it is though, because I was able to boot up a linux live CD and access files on the hard drive. Too bad I don't really have any idea how to use linux.

 

Woot. I got my computer working again. I found a nice program called NTFS4DOS (http://www.datapol.de/dpe/freeware/index.html) that allowed me to run chkdsk, and was then able to boot into safe mode and do a system restore. Thankfully my RAM wasn't faulty.