It may not be this, but I ran into the same problem where it would freeze at the motherboard splash screen and I had just been re-configuring some hard drives, so I unplugged them all and it got past the splash screen, plugged one in at a time and restarted, found the culprit, changed the Sata cable and then it worked the first time after that. It's a long shot, but sometimes if the cables are bent too tight around corners, or if it has a slight defect which does happen, try that next time. Just another troubleshooting tip.