Hi Le Pen,
When you say it hangs when detecting drives, do you mean on the screen when it is counting memory etc?
Basically, when you switch the computer on, it tests RAM, processor, floppy and detects the hard drive(s)/cd-roms
Can you see if its detecting a drive successfully? Go into BIOS setup and make sure it is configured to AUTODETECT on all IDE devices (Primary master/slave secondary master/slave)
You then need to check the order of cables and jumpes on the hardware, basically you will have 2 IDE controllers. You generally on home computers can have 2 devices on each controller, one configured as a master and one as a slave, the hardware should have stickers on explaining how to configure as a master or slave
If you get past this point and it is not booting, you may have a problem with the windows partition. First step is probably to get a boot disk to see if you can access the drive from a command prompt. You can make a boot disk through any version of windows, if you are unsure how to, you can download a bootdisk here
www.bootdisk.com
To be honest, if alls been well in the past, and its stopped for no apparent reason, it hints at hardware failure or a corrupt partition/boot sector
If you could get some further information that would be great, you could try formatting the master boot record, once you've got to a command prompt above A
type fdisk /MBR
If you are familiar with FDISK, you could check to see if your windows partition is marked as active. You could try software such as Partition Magic which will tell you the status of the partitions on the compute
Any chance you can have a look and come back with some further info?
good luck