Troubleshoot help

[IIIIGooseIIII]

Hello. I put a system together as a gift two years ago, and it's having some serious issues that I'm really not sure how to approach. Wall of text incoming:

Mobo: Foxconn M61PMV
Proc: Athlon X2 7850
Hdd: Seagate barracuda 90gb
Ram: 2gb ddr2-800

When the issue was brought to my attention, the system would take five to ten minutes to boot, and once it hit windows it would completely bog down. The taskbar and wallpaper would be visible, and the mouse responded to movement, but no desktop icons would appear. Also, trying to click and drag randomly on the screen caused it to become unresponsive.

I first decided to boot to safe mode to see if I could save some data (just in case) and perhaps troubleshoot the problem, but it would always hang after "Loading classpnp.sys." It's possible the system would have eventually gotten into safe mode (similar to how it would get to the desktop), but I never left it for more than fifteen minutes.

I attempted startup repair several times, ran "chkdsk" several times, used seagate's drive diagnostics boot cd, and scanned for viruses with windows defender offline. Startup repair indicated the it couldn't fix the problem, and the rest of the drive related tasks reported no problems. I also tried booting with the dvd drive unplugged (as I had issues with a drive recently and figured it was worth a shot), but that didn't help.

Finally, I loaded ubuntu to back up the data, formatted the drive and attempted to reinstall windows. After leaving it on overnight (8+ hours), it was still "Expanding windows files 67%" I let it go on as I went to work, and as it stands I can load into the bios, but nothing appears past the motherboard splash screen.

I'm assuming it's a hardware issue at this point, but which? Hard drive checks indicate it's okay, and unfortunately I don't have a ddr2 stick to swap out to test. Anyone have any experience with anything like this?

Thanks for reading!

[fincher234]

But ubuntu ran fine?
You were in a livecd ubuntu environment and not with ubuntu installed?

[IIIIGooseIIII]

That correct, I didn't install ubuntu.

[fincher234]

As you have already wiped out the contents of the drive have you tried to manually repartition the drive before running the install?

I would suggest trying to install ubuntu, letting it grab the whole disk. You say the livecd works fine. Have you tried running the livecd for a while to see if problems erupt or did you just do a quick check? If the install behaves in a similar way to windows then I would say it looks like something is going on with the hard drive, even though you ran a diagnostics boot cd.

[IIIIGooseIIII]

That's a great idea, thank you.
Also, the live cd ran flawlessly for about 30 minutes, but I've yet to test it longer.

[IIIIGooseIIII]

FWIW Attempting to install Ubuntu produced a hard drive related error, so I think I'm set.

Thank you again, fincher!

[fincher234]

Ok, the fact that the livecd (not using the hard drive) works, but the install doesn't, would point to the hard drive.
Before buying a replacement though I would try moving the hard drive to another port, if available and, if you have another cable available, I would try that as well. If the problem remains then I would say the hard drive. If the problem disappears then it sounds like a bad cable or motherboard port.