Pete wrote:
>
> I recently set up a system with an Asus A7A266 motherboard. I
> installed windows ME and all was fine, then the next day i started
> the machine up and got a boot disk failure message.
>
> I used a different power connector and a different 80 wire IDE
> ribbon cable. All seemed ok for a few days till I got another boot
> disk failure message when i booted up. I switched off and on a
> couple of times and the message went away and the computer loaded
> without problems.
>
> I got anothe error message a few days later so i did a full
> surface scan on the 20GB disc but no problems were found. I
> changed the hard disk for another 20GB one, so now I had changed
> the drive, the power cable and the ribbon cable and still I get
> intermittent boot disk failures messages at boot up. Both drives
> show no problems at all when scanned.
>
> I am assuming that the motherboard IDE is knackered or could this
> be caused by something else? Wrong master slave designation,
> incorrect bios setting, drive connected via wrong cable connector
> (grey instead of black)?????

Smells like a memory problem. You can ignore this possibility if
you have ECC memory, and have enabled ECC correction in the bios.
Memtest86 might well show it up.

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