[aolforbroadband]

Alright, updating everyone:

Haven't really had this issue much as of late. In fact, not really much in the past few weeks since the night I made this thread. Then yesterday it happens twice. So I swap in my friends raptor drive which he lent me to test out to see if my HD is going bad. Everything's working fine then I notice the system hiccuping in the same way it did with my original HD... later I try rebooting and the system hangs right after the splash screen like 4 times in a row. I'm like OK, screw this... I switch back in my original HD and try using a different SATA port on the mobo and also using a different SATA cable. My friend lent me those too, and I think they're actual Western Digital brand cables or something, and I know the cable I was using before was some cheap cable-to-go brand from newegg that I got last year.

When I first fire it up it loads windows, but explorer.exe didn't respond so I restarted again and here I am. I don't know what the fark is going on, but I seriously am sick of this issue. Not sure if switching the SATA cable and using a different port on the motherboard makes any real difference yet, but I'd figure I give it a try...

Oh, and I inspected all the capacitors with a flashlight and none appear deformed from what I can see. There's hardly any dust to speak off, and temperatures look fine. Any help is greatly appreciated, and at least now we know it doesn't appear to be a bad HD issue.