Freezing on booting

This is related to the last post I made here. The result of this made me install a new hard-disk.

What happened was one day my computer refused to boot up. It got one step after the BIOS info and “drives detected”, then froze with a completely black screen. Although the drive had become non-bootable, it could still be read if I booted from another source!

I tried all I could think of, including trying to repair the Windows system by booting from my original Windows XP disk. Even doing that, the computer still froze in the same manner.

Anyone got any ideas?

MF