PC goes into sleep mode

My computer HD is full, well the other day the screensaver had froze and I rebooted. Well while it was rebooting it went into sleep mode. This happens right after the BIOS ram test. Do you think the HD died?

hi, Mikebits,
if you have another HDD try to boot from that and check the load on various partitions of your orignal one. you can vacate the C;\ by 50% byshifting the content to D:\ or E:\ . Later, try to defrag the c: .

mean time we can also suspect that lot of dust accumulated in the CPU heatsink, and the thermal shout down might be taking place, and we are likely to confuse it as HDD or load related.

Finally, check whether the machine's RAM is too small. you can reduce many proghrams from startup that eat away the ram by pr-allocation of memory opening all programs as per startup.

i suppose we do this under windows, at 'run' , 'msconfig'

all the best

Any other ideas?

try last known good boot , instead of normal boot. you can try safe mode, if it is holding? it helps debugging.could even be a virus. any message that is put out before freezing including "POST'
BEEPS THAT COULD SIGNAL SOME THING?

A BAD BIOS BATTERY WITH DATE WRONGLY SET ALSO BEHAVES THE SAME WAY, I SUPPOSE, mIKE !!

Have you, or can you get, a linux distro on CD? If you boot into linux from CD you will be able to see your HD... If you can't.... Well then I agree with mvs... Cpu tripping out.

Hi Mike,
Ian's suggestion is a good one and the linux OS Knoppix is by far the best out there. In fact Knoppix is only designed to run off a cd/dvd and you be blown away by the graphics if you do use it.

Cheers Bryan

I cracked open the PC, pulled all the boards and ram and resocketed. All the fans are spinning. Measured the 12vdc and 5vdc and they are okay. I try getting into CMOS but the PC just goes into sleep mode???

Typical . can we try replace the CPU fan for a while, if you have any spare or can manage for observation?
secondly, may be the ATX psu is goofing up. i had this issue and found that one diode of the 12V generating supplies fail;ed. i had to replace the psu.