Ok, I'm absolutely pissed off so I'll try to make as much sense as possible. First of all, this evening the computer froze up just within seconds of booting up the desktop. The first thing I did was open up Word and everything completely froze up for about 2 minutes. Yep, a pure desktop freeze. Hadn't had one of those since...ever, dating back to when I built this gaming system last November.

Secondly, for the past couple of days I've been hearing an obnoxiously loud ticking noise from my HDDs. They used to be dead silent but now I'm getting sick of the ticking every time the HDD is loading something. Speedfan's SMART analysis shows nothing wrong, other than a "watch" for the 'power on hours' section of both drives. I ran chkdisk /f on both drives and the ticking only happened while the D drive was being scanned. Both were free of any errors or bad sectors. I loaded up Diskeeper and lo and behold, the HDD in charge of the D drive was heavily fragmented. Funny, that never happened before as I always have DK's auto defrag running. That seems to have done away with the noise.

Then I came across a bigger problem. The Start menu was suffering from some freezing, but the Add/Remove Programs dialog was completely unusable. If I tried to uninstall or change something within the list, the dialog box would remain open but completely frozen. The only way to get through it was with a restart. Menus and everything else still worked, just the filthy bastard of a dialog box frozen in the middle of the screen. I was able to make the problem reappear by trying to uninstall a program but canceling the confirmation. That seems to have gone away after the defrag, but I'm not too sure.

As I was running GRID and testing some Fraps recording, I minimized the game and opened a small 10 second AVI video clip in WMP. After I closed that and moved through a couple folders, all hell broke loose. The entire screen just froze up immediately. The only thing I could do was bring up the task manager. Everything else was frozen and unusable. Even time stood still. I had to do a hard restart to get that **** over with.

I finally had enough and went into System Restore. I noticed that I have a restore checkpoint for every day of this month. I selected June 1st and the restore only took about 2 seconds to complete. Curious. Once the desktop loaded up, I was greeted with a nice "Restore Incomplete" dialog. I tried a whole bunch of other restore points - the result was the same.
Event viewer doesn't say anything other than system restore didn't work because it didn't work.

A restoration to "System Checkpoint" restore point failed. No changes have been made to the system.

*sigh* I'm completely stumped. If you can lend a hand, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'd first off run the manufacturers diagnostic on the hard drive.

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.

Next suspect would be RAM.

MemTest.

Next your PSU.

FrozenCPU ATX 2.0 Ultimate LCD Power Supply Tester (20/24 pin ATX, SATA, P4, Xeon, PCI-E, Floppy, 4 pin) - FrozenCPU.com

Have you tried running in Safe Mode and if yes have you had the same problems there?

I've had those WD Lifeguard Tools for a few days now. Is it actually supposed to do anything other than sit there and be useless?

Right now, my big problem is with system restore. There's just no way I can get it to work.

Sharing my Speedfan SMART results:

I'm running sfc /scannow at the moment. I also reset System Restore as none of the restore points were working anyways.

I've borrowed my brother's external HDD and am moving lots of important stuff for safekeeping. Problem is, there won't be enough disk space for everything. Is there some sort of program that can create a smaller image file of some of the folders on my D drive and then place it on the external for safekeeping?

Quadruple post

I just ordered the following:

-Western Digital SE16 500GB SATA2 7200RPM 16MB Cache (same as one of my current drives)
-nGear Internal SATA to External eSATA Bracket
-I-ROCKS IR-9410ES Black Aluminum 3.5IN SATA Hard Drive Enclosure eSATA USB2.0

Hopefully nothing happens before those arrive and I can set up an external backup system easily.

Originally Posted by CaptainMazda

Is there some sort of program that can create a smaller image file of some of the folders on my D drive and then place it on the external for safekeeping?

Have you tried Cobian Backup, get it here FREE There are 4 compression levels.

Hmm, thanks I'll check it out. I won't worry about backups until I get the external set up. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid.

Everything is working perfectly once again for now.

The WDC tool is a boot disc. At least the good version.

Data Lifeguard Diagnostic v5.04f for DOS (Floppy) (December 2005)

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.

If you do not have a floppy drive create the ISO version for CD

Data Lifeguard Tools 11.0 for DOS (05.15.2006)

You could also try a Repair Install of XP which should retain your data and programs.

I'd suggest your symptoms are much more hardware related.

Again MemTest is also good to check.

Thanks for the clarification, Jeph. Hopefully the problems have passed and it's clear sailing from here.

However, if I am forced to do any kind of repair installation or format, I might as well install Vista Ultimate x64. I've got the DVD ready and waiting in case problems reappear after my files are backed up and safe.

Oh btw, since I used Sfc /scannow, I'm back to using SP2. I think I'll keep it that way, I have suspicions about SP3.