System won't boot, restarts

[Wingy]

To begin, I'll give you my specs (It's old):

ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe
Athlon XP 3000+ Barton
ATI Radeon 9800
2x512 Corsair XMS pc3200
74 gig Raptor SATA
2x 80gig IDE WD 7200 (Can't remember the model off hand)
XP Pro sp2

The two days I fired up the computer, and noticed it would hang at the windows loading screen. After about 8 tries (because I really didn't wanna mess with it) it booted and ran fine. Except I noticed that the 2 IDE HDD's weren't showing up in My Computer. Around this time, I also began to hear a bit of a clicking noise.

So I shut it down, pulled the two ide drives, and tried to boot, and this time it gets to the windows loading screen and restarts. Tried about 5 times, and note I didn't hear the clicking.

So I grabbed the ultimate boot cd, fired it up, and tried to run a diagnostic on the Raptor, it restarted right when it began. Tried again, same thing. So I pulled the Raptor and tried running memtest86+ and it ran all night, no errors. So then I tried to run the Mersenne Prime program to see if maybe my CPU was being funky, and it restarts before that even begins.

So any ideas? I've already had to replace this motherboad about 12 months ago, it's a piece of crap I think. I'm thinking I may as well build a new system now, if this one is gonna be too much trouble to repair. I'm on an ultra thin budget, however, since I'm in college, but I can prolly spend $500-600, maybe on a REAL lowend AM2 or 939 system. If anybody has any suggestions on what to buy, or how to fix the problem, I would appreciate it. Thanks!

 

[engiNURD]

Run WD's lifeguard tools diagnostics program to check the HDD. Are you OC'ing you CPU at all? If so, bring it back down to stock. Last I checked, memtest loads nothing onto the HDD, everything is loaded into RAM. What PSU are you using? What are your temps?

As for a new system, what do you use your computer for, mostly?

 

[Wingy]

I couldn't run the HDD tests, it kept restarting, even when booting from CD.

I then tried to run a CPU test with all HDD's unplugged, and got the same result.

No OC's, and my temps were right around 50, a little more then average for me, but it has to do with my new apartment, so that seemed fine.

My PSU is a 550 watt PSU, and I'm almost 100% its fine. If I get a new machine, I'll prolly need a new one anyway, for the 24 pin.

I know memtest doesn't touch the HDD, but I figured the CPU might be ok because memtest does require a working CPU.

And as for a new machine, I mostly do homework, music, movies, web stuff... I like to game, but don't usually have time for it, and when I do, I want to be able to play newer games, but I don't require any sort of crazy settings.

Thanks for replying!