Hey, I'm running this older than crap PC, a P4 3.0ghz processor on an IC7-G mainboard with a radeon rage 9550 graphics card, a sb live! sound card, and a linksys 10/100 nic card. It has 1gb of ram on two 512 sticks.

This entire system was great when I first assembled it 4 years or whatever it was ago, I bought all the parts new, now everything's outdated - so on and so forth.

This thing is about as stable as a psycho path on PCP.

It's been messing with me on startup though, and it's really ticking me off. Once it boots, it seems to be running fine (well except for its usual crap). The hard drive was completely raped so I just reinstalled windows XP, nothing on it 'cept pidgin, avg, comodo, and safari, it doesn't seem to matter if there's 2 programs on it, or 200 programs on it, this problem is hardware related.

The drives are both SATA, which is surprising because when this mainboard was purchased (it was new at the time), SATA was JUST coming out, so I have IDE crap and SATA crap.

So the problem is quite simple, it RANDOMLY DECIDES whether it wants to read the hard drive or not. Also, I'm pretty sure USB devices are raping it.

It's real simple, if I have a USB keyboard plugged in, or my external hard drives - no boot, at all, isn't happening, end of story. If I have my PS2 keyboard plugged in there, this is where it has a chance to boot.

The problem is simple, it DECIDES whether it wants to read the drive or not, when it does the first boot up screen (where you have the option to enter the BIOS), the hard drive just ISN'T listed. Then I'll mess with it, restart it, whatever, and then bam, it'll be there, it'll boot, it'll run windows, no problems, etc. etc.

I can't figure out why it randomly decides to "not read" the drive upon boot. Then it obviously gets to the mid-screen and it's like "whoa, boot disk failure!!" - so that doesn't go far without reading it. It won't load past the windows splash screen if the external hard drives are plugged in even though the whole "scan external hard drives" thing in the bios is disabled.

I have it plugged into SATA1, when it does register (ie. now), it registers as a master, I have it plugged into pins 1/2 (the jumper), vertical, all the way to the left, as according to seagate/maxtor's site, that's the "master" position (though I hear SATA uses cable select which overrides the jumper settings anyways, though both the jumper and the cable are set to master).

I have no idea why it randomly decides to get an attitude with me - but it does.

Anybody that's willing to shed some light on the situation please, feel free. This computer system is very unstable, but i've been messing with computers since before duke nukem 3D came out ('96), I used to play games like Jazz the jack rabbit, and duke nukem I, and II.

In any event, I've been building computers my whole life and never have seen a problem like this, ever. In all honesty I like IDE better, the plugs don't fall out so damn easy and it doesn't seem to have as many problems, I've had nothing but pain and suffering with the SATA systems, which was why I was running an IDE 40gb as a master w/ XP with a 200gb data slave until the MBR decided to eat itself and I couldn't repair it with the disk (I'm guessing the boot sector got corrupted or something). In any event, I have never seen anything like this, but as I said, when I built this computer, SATA was some "new age shit" - so this is my first computer (aside from my laptop, which doesn't count, obviously) which uses a SATA system.

I really do hate the thing with a passion, the fan control wires unplugged somewhere so all fans assume maximum speed, sometimes the secondary (non-processor) main board fan jams up, all 10 or whatever fans running at 100% speed make it sound like a jet engine turbine. I definitely hate this computer more than a lot of other things, though in light of my HP Pavilion DV9000 becoming unstable FOUR DAYS after the warranty was up, I need stability. I can't afford a new computer, or computer doctor, or any other crap to that effect.

Please, anybody, help?

PS: I doubt anybody will be able to help me, but in case anybody can, a useful tip of info which I forgot to include. The main hard drive I'm using (that won't get recognized) (has a fresh install of windows and <5 programs on it) is a Maxtor 6Y200M0 - status says (ATM) that it's working properly.

I don't know if it matters at all but I just installed speedfan and it shows the "fire" icon on HD0 (my hard disk) which is reading 51*C, and "TEMP1" (whatever the hell that is) also has the fire icon reading 55*C.

From my experience neither of these numbers are high...but I'm just trying to include everything...

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In case the above doesn't make any sense, note that I don't know anything about computers.

"Horsepower sells motor cars, but torque wins motor races"
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