PC freezing problems

[Sane]

My PC was working fine untill I decided to get a new HD a few days ago. I bought a 200GB SATA drive and after some initial problems managed to get it installed and working. To get it installed I had to take the graphics card out of the AGP slot and the sound card out of the PCI slot and put them back in when finished.

The problem is that the PC has now started to freeze occaisionally. It happens every now and then and it will simply display what's on the screen but not respond at all anymore. The DVD drives will still open and close though. Then I have to press reset and it will freeze at the ASUS screen (it's an ASUS K8N-E deluxe mobo btw) where it says 'press del to enter bios'. It won't respond and after about 10 seconds it will reboot and freeze again at the same point. It just keeps doing that untill I turn it off completely, wait a minute or so and then turn it back on, after which it will boot normally.

So, does anyone have any idea at all what the problem could be?

Thanks in advance.

Specs of the PC:

ASUS K8N-E Deluxe mobo
Althlon AMD 64 3400+
2 sticks of Corsair 512 MB DDR RAM
2 IDE HDD's and 1 SATA HDD

[EvilBoris]

try clearing the CMOS

[charlaph]

It could just be something as simple as a dodgy cable or connection. I had a similar problem when I tried using my DVD-RW with an Abit Serielle2 IDE>SATA adaptor. Every now and again the PC would just freeze and not respond to inputs. In the end after updating all my drivers and trying a different PSU... I just swapped SATA cables and that solved the problem.

[Sane]

I will try swapping the SATA cable, but I don't think that will solve it because after having installed the SATA initially it wouldn't recognize the drive and I unhooked it completely. During that time the problem first appeared.

I'll also try clearing the CMOS and reinstalling the floppy drive, I left that out after putting int he drive since it's hard to reach. I already ran memtest tonight for about 8 hours and that came up clean so atleast I know it's not the memory that's faulty.

I changed a setting in the BIOS so I can see the POST thing instead of the ASUS logo it displayed before, I will write down after which line it hangs and post it, maybe that will help determining what the problem is.