Unusual boot problem

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I turn on my PC, the BIOS stuff gets displayed... Then the Boot menu appears with Widows XP Professional and the Recovery consol. Either I select Windows XP, or I allow it to default to Windows XP.
Then it goes black and just sits there with the hard drive light on solid. It doesn't do anything, just sits here.
If I press the reset key, it goes through the boot menu like it should, shows the Windows Logo, and boots as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
It does this every time I cold start my PC.

It gets stranger. If my PC went in to hibernate, it will restore hibernate from cold without any problem at all what-so-ever and do it blazingly fast at that.

I consider myself somewhat advanced with computers, but I am beyond baffled.

MY SETUP:
2 PATA hard drives, 2 PATA CD/DVD drives, 1 SATA hard drive
SATA is boot
Intel Pentium 4 2.4Ghz, Hyper Threaded
1GB Ram - Dual Channel
Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 (resently clean installed, which did not help my issue any that I can remember)

What I've done to attempt repair:
Double, tripple, quaduple checked all my BIOS/CMOS settings\
Made sure my BIOS was up to date
Clean installed Windows XP and Service Pack 2
Checked my hard drive's temperatures durring heavy load and improved cooling.
Checked voltages, made sure they were accurate
Checked my Hard drives' SMART sensors and did a full scan

PLEASE help, this is driving me insane, as I could REALLY use my Wake-On-Lan features and I'm always feeling sick puke: at boot, afraid that this will be the time it doesn't boot. :dead:
 
something hardware wise is failing. I had a similar problem when some RAM I had failed. Get a copy of memtest86 and check your RAM.
 
ok- could be a driver issue. I have had SATA drives and had problems with drivers so I went back IDE....

Can you load windows off the CD ?
 
It's gotten worse

Ok, here is what just happened....
I turned on my PC, it resumed from Hibernate... reset itself,
Hung at BIOS
I powered off, Powered on, hung at BIOS
I powered on/off, it boot to windows, then reset itself...
I Powered off/on again, it hung just before the boot menu

Then I lost track. It took about 6 times to get it to boot all the way in to Windows and remain running. Obviously, there's something failing in my computer. SATA drive (boot) is brand new, and all 3 drives pass their SMART tests with flying colours, so I doubt that it's the hard drives.
Memory passed.

So, now what do I do? puke:
 
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