Experiencing weird computer problems

[PSYKLONUS]

Hello everyone, I have something of a more technical question that I was wondering if I might be able to get some help with. I have an old Aopen AX6BC (P3) motherboard, with a P3 450, 192mb PC100 SDRAM, Fujitsu 10GB IDE disk, Samsung DVDROM, SBLive! Value PCI, 10/100MBit PCI NIC, Nvidia TNT2 Ultra AGP. I am intending on using this computer for a small webserver with some other light duties. Now the problems I have been experiencing are very unusual... Firstly, I tried to install Windows 2000 Server w/SP4 onto it The first problem I had was a stop error "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" which I am almost certain is a kernel error. The installation CD itself is in mint condition and I have used it many times, so I am pretty sure that the data on it is not corrupt. After repeated errors and many repartitions and formats, the disk just seems to work all of a sudden, and the OS installs fine. Then it takes an extremely long time to boot. It sits at the Windows 2000 Server splash screen for a few minutes, and then eventually just loads into the GUI. After logging into the machine (or just leaving it at the prompt if I dont log in), a dialog box pops up saying "A device failed to start during start up. Check Event Viewer for details" After looking in Event Viewer, it gives me a red cross error, with the "atapi" error and in the details there is about 20 or so of the same thing saying that "Ide port1" did not respond during the time period" or something like that. In the data dump in the bottom of each error box, therre seems to be the same information in each of herm except for a bit of garbled data in the same spot. The time these errors occurred seems to imply that this is what is causing the server so long to start up. Thinking that this is probably what is causing the problems, I change the master/slave designations on the DVDROM and the HD and put them on IDE controller 2, and disabling IDE1 in BIOS. The system boots up much faster now, and I am not getting any of these ATAPI errors. OK BUT... (and you knew there would be =) Now I am trying to install Fedora Core 4 onto the machine. I set it up to boot off the Linux CD, it gets a lot of the way through the boot up process and then says "hdd: lost interrupt" After about 5 of so of these messages pop up down the screen, it eventually just goes into set up and allows the set up procedure to begin. It then lets me go pretty much 90% of the way through the Linux install, even letting me format and partition disks and select packages to install before it tells me that there was an abnormal error and then drops out of the GUI setup back to the terminal interface and says that I can now reboot my computer. Woohoo. When I do, the BIOS no longer detects the HD. At the autodetect portion, it sits there for a few seconds, and then just gives up. If you power off the machine, most times it will just redetect the drive. I have a suspicion that either the motherboard has had some sort of problem and had fried the IDE controller and whatever drive was on it. I dont really want to flash the BIOS to see if that helps because this computer has worked fine for many years without any problems. Does anyone have any ideas what this could be and how I could more accurately troubleshoot it? Thanks Dane