Wonderful, I just got Blue Screened!

[lembasbread]

About 3 days back I switched cases and added some LED lights (kept my same 500 watt psu) and I had some problems with my computer not recognizing my hard drive. I switched IDE cables and all was well. I used my computer for quite some time between then and the error. Now today (1 day after), I come home boot up windows opens and wham! Just as applicatios are starting up I get a blue screen! It dumped my memory and I didn't have much time to read it before it rebooted. I proceeded to reboot and went through GNU grub as usual (a linux thing to pick between operating systems). When I selected Widnows XP Media Center it just sat there reading something like "(hd,0) unrecognized OS." There was other stuff too, but I didn't bother to write it down unfortunatly, but it didn't seem too terribly important at the time and it doesn't seem to be the main focus at the moment either. I rebooted several times and without luck decided I should reinstall Windows over my old copy. I grab Windows Media Center and boot from cd to install. Windows would not let me install it without formatting my current partition (it was "too full or damaged"). I gave up on that, not ready to format my hard drive unless it was just about the only way to get my computer working again. Then I tried to boot up again and I got an error before GNU Grub came reading

"A disk read error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

I went and got another hard drive and tried to boot up from that only to get a blue screen telling me to check for viruses, change back any changed hardware etc... It did not dump the memory this time, nor did it prompt me to.

Unfortunatly, this passes the domain of my experience in computer repair and I came here (on one of my extra computers) to request some help. Any insight, even if it is not a direct solution would be very beneficial. If any of you need more imformation I will do what I can to get it.

*System Specs*
CPU - AMD Athlon 4200+ X2 Dual-core series
MOBO - Gigabyte nForce 4 SLi K8 Triton
GFX Card - ATI Radeon x1800 XL All-In-Wonder
RAM - 2 512mb chips of Centon pc3200 (ddr400) ram.
HD - 200gb Maxtor HD
PSU - 500 watt "PCMCIS PCM-PSP4ATX50C"
2 flashing LED lights (doubt this was worth the time to type, but better too much info than not enough)

*OS - Windows XP Media Center, Ubuntu 5.04 (Linux) - this doesn't work properly at the moment (and hasn't for a while) and it seems that there is still a command-prompt type thing still available. I think the Linux GUI is screwed...

* Recent changes - Upgraded from a AMD Athlon 2200+ and a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro to a AMD Athlon 4200+ and an ATI Radeon x1800 XL about a month ago. I also switched cases (not psu) a few days ago, but it ran fine even after the case swap until recently.

Thanks in advance and I hope we can work through this!

 

[Snump]

Could be a hard drive going bad.
But I would doo a google on a Linux boot disk and try running a file system diagnostic.

 

[lembasbread]

I am very inexperienced with Linux, so my primary skill would lie with Windows. I'm just about clueless in Linux and I can't do much without a step-by-step walkthrough. Also, if it's the HD going bad then why didn't the other HD work either? I'm also curious why I went through these different error stages. Why did it keep changing from blue screen to no boot to bluescreen to hd read error?

2/24 Update:
I put in another HD (from this comp) that I know works and I get a blue screen. When I boot up with no HD, I don't get any errors (other than it not detecting my HD on the IDE device list) but it just sits there after "veryifying dmi pool data" with a NVIDIA and Intel copyright thing and boot-loader. I have an ATI card and an AMD cpu so I don't know what the deal is with that, but I have seen it in the past well before these problems occurred and I had no problems with them. Any more suggestions?