Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how would I check that? =)

However, I dont get the delayed write error, and the problem seems to be absent with the install of xp rather than 2k.

judging from what this article: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/176427

has to say, my HD does use an 80 pin because the ribs are much finer than my cd drives, which that article predicts.

Sounds like you do, yes the ribs are finer, and the cable feels different to run your finger along.

But I think you might have an error reading and writing to your hard drive, and its not the fault of the hard drive itself if you have been swapping drives around.

Have you tried taking your hard drive that contains important data out, and just run with one drive? Maybe even think about moving things, so that one drive is master on one channel, and one drive is master on the other; make no drive a slave. Also, jumper the drives as masters and don't use cable select / auto setting. Have only optical drives as slaves. Jumper those as slaves too. Don't have any drive using cable select / auto setting. Use the new type of cable with both if possible.

I am sure someone posted about this problem years ago and that was what they said. I think a number of steps helped to fix the problem in the end, the above were some of them.

you're not using NTFS? why not?

What I have right now is my master drive connected to my mobo, and my secondary drive that I use for storage purposes connected as master on a PCI ATA controller card. Both are jumpered and detected as masters.

I emailed the guy who started this thread, and he said

"Ohh yea, What the problem was in my case was the IDE
controllers on my motherboard were bad, and installing
multiple programs and transferring large files
(multiple gigs)between my two hard drives kept
corrupting my hard drives, so I replaced my
motherboard and i haven't seen that problem since."

I hope this isnt the cause on my computer, but if it were, how could I tell this? And wouldnt this also affect my XP installation?

And yes I am using NTFS, what made you think I wasnt?

Start changing cables and running with just the hard drive, etc before you start returning motherboards, you may well have a bad cable. But yes, you could have a bad IDE controller. Try taking the PCI ATA controller hard out, just run with the mobo IDE controllers, and see if the problems still persist with a clean windows install.

OK, so I removed my PCI ATA controller card, swapped cables out on my main HD, and reloaded win2k...and everything seems fine so far, I just installed WoW with no errors. I'm going to go try CS:S, and if that goes well, and its still up by tomorrow I may try reconnect my secondary HD tomorrow. But should I connect it on the controller card or on the slave cable to my mobo? Because my mobo only has 1 slot for a HD cable...But I'm also afraid if I have faulty IDE controller on my mobo that if my secondary drive get corrupted I'd lose a crapload of stuff that I'd rather not lose =P

yea....so I installed CS:S and on the last cd I got the error again that was with a different ribbon, no ata control card...

So now I'm back on XP, and going to try to see if I can get the error here. If I can't, I have no idea wth is going on.

That is starting to sound like a motherboard fault. You've eliminated HDD, OS and cable, if you have used updated IDE controller drivers (get most up to date mobo drivers for this) then you have eliminated everything, I guess, apart from the mobo itself.

Can you DISABLE the primary IDE controller, and attach a hard drive to the second controller, along with an optical drive (for installation purposes.) Try to install the OS with just the secondary controller being used, what happens now?

like phantasm66 said, it's probably a MB fault. If you run straight off the motherboard, chances are your hard drives either won't work or they will run VERY slow. You have an ATA card there for a reason because your MB probably doesn't support faster IDE hard drives.

If you suspect the MB IDE port is bad, don't connect it up. It isn't worth the risk.

Well, if its completely F@~@~@~@ed anyway, he can connect the drive that does not contain important information to the secondary controller, and have the primary controller disabled in the BIOS. Then, boot from CD (slave on secondary) and install a fresh XP. Do the problems go away???

Well, I still havent eliminated an OS issue, I have yet to crash when using XP.

Oh that's interesting. Have you tried the latest mobo drivers in Windows 2000???

Meaning updating the BIOS? I havent because they have a giant warning on the website saying only do it if you're sure it will fix the problem because it can just create more problems. =) Think I should try it?

Ooor, would that be "Silicon Image Serial ATA driver version V1.0.0.50 WHQL and Serial ATA Utility V1.1.3"?

*edit* Nevermind, thats just serial ata...so the only thing I can find on the website that would be applicable would be the BIOS...*/edit*

No, not the BIOS. The chipset drivers for your motherboard, which will be available from the motherboard manufacturer, and will support Windows 2000. These will contain IDE controller drivers. You should try to install these if they are available, rather than relying on the Windows 2000 stock drivers, which might be causing the problem.

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/downl...Language=en-us is the driver download page for my mobo, only thing on there is SATA, video and LAN drivers, at least that I can see.

*edit* On utilities tab I found "NVIDIA nForce all in one Drivers for 2000 WHQL package version 2.64." Which has an ide folder in the zip file. I'll try that later today, but do I need to install those somehow before I load 2k? Or just install 2k and then install them? */edit*

No, you can go into device manager and update drivers for the device and point it to the IDE folder, or the IDE folder might have its own installer program. So, you can try these with your existing Win2k install.

Uhm...so I download the driver, open the folder, double click IDE, even though its the 2000 version, theres a choice of 2000 and xp, when I double click the 2000 one, its empty...but the xp one has 4 files in it...

So I checked the cd that comes with the mobo and its the same way.

Applies to all Windows operating systems older than XP Service Pack 1.

My explanation to it is that when you have an operating system that can't access the sectors beyond 137 GB correctly, the 'access pointer' flips to zero and starts writing from the start of the drive when it should write to beyond 137 GB area.

This has happened to me too, with Win2k SP4 and a 160 GB hdd.

Everything was fine until during defragmentation it moved data to the last sectors of the disk, but in reality it overwrote data in the beginning, the data being $mft$, master file table.

So, pretty much everything became unreadable, because there was no reliable information about where the files were stored on the partition.

Here's how to fix it (at least that's what others say):

# Start a registry editor (e.g., regedit.exe). In Windows, click on Start->Run, enter "regedit".

# Navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ atapi \ Parameters registry subkey.

# From the Edit menu, select New, DWORD Value.

# Enter the name EnableBigLba, then press Enter.

# Double-click the new value, set it to 1, then click OK.

# Restart the machine for the change to take effect.