Lately i've been getting some real random boot failures, especially after playing counter-strike source. I'll play it for an hour or so then my PC will hang, reboot, then say boot failure, sometimes it doesn't even get that far, the fans will come on, no post beep, and the HDD light stays on. To sort the problem i have to take the side off, wiggle some power and IDE connectors to the HDD and it works again.

Obviously i don't want to have to keep doing that everytime. I've tried re-seating RAM. Could it be a PSU problem? My £15 ebuyer 500w PSU is a few years old now, but it is only running two optical drives, a HDD, and my 9800 pro g-card.

Any ideas?

Cheers.

I think your pc is trying to tell you not to play CSS. Wise words from the machine tbh

lol, it's done it with pro evo and a few others before too.

If the hdd lights stay on and u have boot failure then maybe it's the hdd.

i've had the same problem a few years ago random hangups/bootfailures.

Two months later the hdd crashed, bougth a new one and never had a problem since....

(sorry 4 my English i'm Dutch)

I did have a major crash the other month and windows kept booting into chkdsk, but it never found any errors or bad sectors so i turned chkdsk off. But i have noticed in event viewer i get this error...

The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:

However, volume C is my dump drive which i keep nothing but music and videos on, volume D is my systems partition.

The file system structure keeps track off where u put your files and exists on both the C and D partition. and even though u have windows on D a pc always wants to start a bootprocedure from the first partition (thats why you'll find hidden file's like boot.ini etc on the c partition).
In those files it will see that you're OS is located on D.

if chkdsk can't find a problem then maybe u could check both partitions with third party software like partition magic (works beter for me than chkdsk).

If that doesn't solve the problem than u should try format a a last resort.

With Harddrives its'always difficult to check if it's truely faulty

Ah i see.

I'm due a format really, might go for that if all else fails.

I've got a maxtor drive and on the maxtor site it's got some disk checker software but you need to boot into it from a floppy and i just took my floppy drive out cos i never use it, lol.

When i use partition magic to look for errors it says files in use, please use windows checkdisk.

is system restore on???
that could keep part. magic from running

Turned it off along with my anti-virus and it still won't run.

i had a similar problem on my wifes comp, did everything youve just mentioned, and in the end, i turned of the system restore, i freed about 10 gig in the process, run a diskcheck, and everything was fine afterwards.

I've tried de-fragging, freeing up space, all sorts. Just needs a good nuke i guess.