Dying PC

OK I am typing this on my backup T60. About a week ago, my PC died. it was a DIY from about 5 years ago. Everything was going fine untill the beginning of Dec 05. Whne my Win OS goes to the boot screen, there were reboot noises like the HDD shut down and restarted but its still booted up. Then I was playing a game at medium settings, I ran into a serious error. That was the beginning of 06.

Then in March, I was playing another demo, it crashed again, restarted gave me recovered from serious error message. The weird resetting noises grew in intensity. Then about 3/4 moths ago, I finally ran into a BSoD. It said video driver failed to load.

Then finally it just dies. It would load up to the black screen right before the Welcome screen and just restart. I left it on from about 1 hour and a time paradox occurs. I was going to do a repair, click r in the partition section, with the Win OS CD but did not have the option. This was before when I could boot from my external SCSI CD drive. Now when I try to boot with an external SCSI cd drive. I just get a grey screen and flashing cursor. cant type or click only c+a+d to restart.

I've concluded that it is the video driver (ATI 8.x)/card (ATI Radeon 9500Pro), a dying HDD (WD 40 GB), or recently added 250GB HDD. I do not have an internal CD drive so I can't do a repair. I check sys logs and i keep getting "devide/harddrive2 is not ready for asscess." About 30 of those per bootup before it died. WTF is going on?

Is it possible to install a internal CD drive without needing to go to Windows? I have spare sitting around.

>>2 Totally.

What brand is that 250GB hdd you just added?
Did you try removing it like BSOD says?
If it's a Maxtor, don't suprised it failed as soon as it did.

Is your PSU also from 5 years ago? Is it sub-350watts?
I don't know the req. for a 9500, but perhaps your PSU is dying or unable to power a hungry AGPpro+250GB drive simultaneously.

>>3
Its a Maxtor DiamondMax 10, however its just for storage. No Win OS components inside.

Yeah I reinstalled ATI's driver. Complete Catalist uninstall. restarted, reinstall. The day after it died.

The PSU is a TruBlue I think its ~400 or 500.

Is it possible to do chkdisk from a CD or flopy disc?

I've already tried all the F8 options. Safe mode, vga mode, dadad. None of them work. All freeze at the same place.

>>5

Sorry I meant resets at the same place.

how about just a clean windows reinstall

>>7

Yeah but then I loss about 37GB of data in a 40GB HDD. That would be obviously the absolute last option.