I have been working on a Gateway PC for the last few days, and I am completely out of ideas. It started as what I thought being a HDD going bad – swapped it out with a new one, installed Windows 2000. No problems until I shut it down, left it sit for a few hours and restarted it. First it gets stuck on the splash screen, shut it down, restart, gets past the splash screen to the desktop, no icons, freezes up.
Okay, I think, hardware issue, not the HDD. Replaced the IDE cables with new ones, no luck. Swapped the memory chip out, no luck. While listening to it as it boots, there is a sound which resembles a small piece of paper stuck in a fan (sounds like, but there isn’t) and that’s what’s making the system freeze. As long as the PC is booted up and running, I am able to reboot with no problems. The system ran for two days straight, and no errors. This only happens when it is shut down and has to do a cold boot.
I plan on stripping it down to a bare bones system to further investigate this issue, but any other ideas are greatly welcome!
BTW – Gateway PC, 1Ghz AMD, 128MB RAM, 16MB Nvidia graphics, and Windows 2000. (The same thing also happens running Windows XP Pro. It was originally running Windows ME)