I have or had (cause its dead now) a 1ghz Pentium 3 computer 256mb of RAM I consistently over clocked to 1.1ghz by raising the FSB for over 2 months and then it just decided to play up and wiped my hard drive:

Scenario

I had turning on this PC just to do some general surfing and pulled out CPUcool the software i used to raise the FSB and I changed it to the normal setting I usually do however it did not just carry on with some added juice it hanged and produced a high pitch noise from within the machine (could not isolate it unfortunately as I pulled the power cable out as fast as I could) and was wonder if that could have been the hard drive as i cannot boot from it now. Could either one of these things:

Pulling the power cable out
Or over clocking

Wiped the boot sector making it unable to boot. Even when I tried it gave me various errors making the machine useless until I find myself another OS any suggestions?

Quite simple really - don't overclock that far again! The high pitched noise you heard may well have been a temperature warning from the PC's BIOS. Was it a mechanical noise or something from the PC speaker?

Almost positive that it was a mechanical noise because it was when a had just set my FSB to a different value once I click ok it hanged It's not a bad thing cause its ment that my dad has got a new dell heh i was just wondering could overclock stop a hard drive from booting? Thanks Anyway monkey

If you overclock the bus, i suppose it may be possible. Never heard of that though, usually its the processor that goes. I was never so scared in my life when I started to smell the silicon melting on my dual athlon system. I tore that power cable from the wall. Luckily, nothing was damaged and I can still use it. OC at your own risk!