Here's my problem. I have a soft modded 1.6 Xbox that appears to do everything fine. It boots up fine, it loads games fine, and it runs all programs fine. However after a few minutes of use the box freezes. When it freezes I can hear the hard drive clicking just as if it were dead. This doesn't matter if it’s from the original disk or my backed up versions on my hdd. I'm fairly sure it's not the hard drive since I have swapped it out and used a different drive in there with the same freezing occurring. Also I have tried 3 different sets of IDE cables as this is what I initially thought it was.

Any help with this would leave me very appreciative.

it does sound like the hd
but, what do your temps look like?
that could also be a problem

I'm fairly certain it's not the HD since I've used two different hard drives in there and both had the same problem. The second hard drive I have put in my second xbox and have been running that just fine for over a year now.

And as for the temp, I'm sure of how to read the temp while playing a game. I think XBMC will tell me the temp of some things but as of now I'm not home so I can't check that out. Will do that in a few hours.