Title basically gives the description. I built my first computer back in JULY and have had some problems with it for a while. Nothing more than getting a blue screen now and then (say, once or twice a day) which I just blamed on Vista Ultimate 64bit due to lack of driver support. How ever this week something very odd has happened.

I got a big old BOOT DISK ERROR, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER message and after tweeking with my computer I came to the conclusion that my hard drive went belly up on me and I couldn't get the dang thing to work at all. So I tried the freezer trick to recover some data I didn't want to loose. Strangly, my drive seemed to work for a while. To play it safe I decided to reformat and do a clean install to see if it would do the trick. This seemed to work untill the installation process got to the point where it had to restart to go further, after the restart all I could get was a blinking curser on a blank screen.

At this point I started thinking it might be my DVD/RW drive rather than my hard drive. Since on all reformat/reinstalls I've tried I can only get that far, yet another strange thing has occoured. When ever I try to start from my hard drive rather than my DVD drive, I get a list to choose which operating system I want to start on, each one listed is Windows Vista, and each one is a copy from when I tried to reformat/reinstall Vista. I can't select any one of them or else I get a blue screen.

Another suggestion I heard is that it might be my ram. I have 4gigs of DDR26400, I already replaced a couple of them before. As for how bad ram would affect my machine is beyond me, ESPECIALLY if it would have taken this long for it to finaly degrade my computer into a $1700 paper weight.


Being that its my first computer I'm trying to do this mostly on my own without any paid help, and so far I'm stumped on what actually might be the problem. Basically, any one have some insight on what might be wrong?Bad ram can be bad from the start, or it can get worse over time as it heats and cools. It could be your problem.

Problems caused by "bad" RAM, (and that can mean defective, or poor quality, or incompatible with your motherboard, not seated properly,  or even timings wrongly set up in the BIOS) can range from freezes and error messages during install to freezes and BSODs during operation and corruption of data and filesystems on disk.

MemTest

Follow the instructions on the site to create a bootable floppy/CD and run it for a few hours.
Any errors mean the RAM is bad.
You may have to run one stick at a time to find the bad one/ones.

May i also suggest DLoading and running the diagnostics on that HDD from the manuf. website (Free). This will tell you for sure if that drive has gone South.I tried your suggestions and figured out that it was a combination of both bad ram and hard drive. My older IDE drive was somehow interfering with my sata drive. Long story short, my sata drive was fine and my IDE was the trouble maker despite being able to load up XP just fine and work like a charm (goodbye 18 gigs of music and videos, my iPod will be barren without you).

The memtest showed up 4 errors the first time I tried it with all of my memory sticks in (4 sticks, 1gig of ram each). After 3 days of extensive testing of each stick, then each stick in each one of the 4 ram slots for 3 hours each, it came up with no errors. I'm HOPING it was somehow an ISOLATED insident caused by my IDE drive, but knowing techology its just another problem that will eventually come to bite me in the *censored*.

Thank you both very much for the help! I can finally enjoy TEAM Fortress 2.