Hung at the desktop

[Monstermile]

Booted up my PC when I got home from work yesterday as usual. Noticed something different:

Primary master drive failure

Not good. So I rebooted again and Windows loaded, but it hung at the desktop. The cursor would move but the hourglass stayed with it and nothing was clickable. When the hourglass finally went away I tried clicking on desktop items and something (maybe HD) made kind of a chirping/dull buzzing sound. It did that every time I moved the mouse, tried clicking, or used the keyboard start-up menu button. So I rebooted again and this time the hourglass stayed.

-Ran Western Digital's diags in both quick and extended tests and got no errors.
-Ran quick and estended scandisk with no results.
-Tried booting into safe mode but the cursor would not move.

Rebooted again and after the desktop was up for a bit it went to a blue screen with this message:

"An exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C0031A4E in VxD--. This was called from 0028:C00301F9 in VxD--. It may be possible to continue normally."

When I hit the any key it went to a black screen with the cursor and hourglass and never went back to the desktop.

Where do I start. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Specs:
Asus A7V8X
Athlon 1700+ tbred B
512MB Kingston HyperX PC2700
Western Digital 80g SE
Excaliber 9000 PRO 128MB
Lite-On DVD
Lite-On 52x24x52 CDRW
Soundblaster Live 5.1
USR 5699B V.92
Win98

[Monstermile]

Bump...anyone?? I don't have net access at home and leave work in a few hours.

Thanks

Can you try different RAM?

Try Memtest86 either way.

[Monstermile]

No don't have access to different RAM. Would memory even be an issue??

Originally posted by Monstermile
Would memory even be an issue??

Sure. I installed some "new" RAM once and it wouldn't boot to the desktop. I could see the background and all that good stuff. Kept getting wierd errors as well. I finally removed the stick of RAM I had just installed and everything was fine again. Turned out the stick was no good.

Do you leave your PC on all the time? If you do, you need to inspect the capacitors on/near the CPU. They could be going bad. They will look swollen and/or have some brown looking crud on them.

Do the visual inspection, then test your RAM.

[Monstermile]

Yes I do leave it on most of the time. I'll check that and run memtest. Wish I had another stick of RAM to try as well. This is actually my second one. First one had to be RMA'ed as well as my first HD. This system has not been right from the start.

[Monstermile]

Well just for s&g's I put the HD in my old system as a primary slave. At boot-up it says Primary Slave Incompatible.

Also I got it to duplicate the noise it was making last night and it was coming from the hd. Does it sound like I have a second bad drive??

[Vickip]

if it's making unusual noises..then, yeah, I would say it is most likely the Hdd...

For more S&G's, try WD's diagnostic software again. Is it still under warranty? Here are some quick links.