Machine hangs on boot (Until it warms up)

Running Vista

Bit of a strange one really. When I boot the machine up it will usually get to the login screen and freeze. If I leave it for a few minutes and force a reboot it will usually be ok. If I reboot it right away - it will hang at some point during the boot. That could be right at the start before it even manages to engage both of the hard drives and nothing apears on my screen at all (no signal), during the windows loading screen (the status bar freezes) or once again at the login screen. If I boot it up and allow it to freeze at and leave it for a few minutes it is normally fine.

My 3rd hard drive has also stopped being found. I initially though this may have been causing the issue as it seems to crash when checking each hard drive for a boot sector (sometimes). Even when it is working it seems unable to find the 3rd hard drive now however.

I was wondering if there was some kind of boot application I could use to street or test everything on boot to find out what is going on. Im fairly certain there must be a hardware fault somewhere.

(Occasionally when it does boot into windows first time and fast, it will later crash, freeze or the screen will just go blank as if the video card has stopped sending a signal).

Any ideas?

 

Greetings, Romerz...

Have you tried booting into Safe Mode, or to your Windows disk?