I'm having some whackiness going on & I'm wondering if it could be my MoBo. It started out with my system getting slow, sometimes locking up or crashing, and since it has been years since I wiped it, I decided to just reformat my drive and do a clean install. After doing so, I know have some weird problems. Sometimes it won't boot up, stating that there has been a boot disk failure. when I go into the MoBo Bios, the auto detect doesn't show a primary master. I have four drives which have windows on them & I have tried each of them in the unit with no change. Then, for no apparent reason, it'll boot and act ok for a while. While trying to upload SP2 from the MS Update website, it went through the "Preparing to download" phase just fine, but then just sat there, never downloading even one bar of the SP2 download. When I pushed CTRL + ALT, the browser closed (IE5) before I even touched Delete. When the desktop was displayed, I noticed the word "Start" was missing from the button in the lower left hand corner. I went to click on it & the task bar disappeared as well as all the desktop icons. I have another drive, which is a SATA, (the previous one I was talking about is PATA), which acts like it is going to boot up, but stops on black screen just after the boot screen. I tried using the disk to fix it and it said it was replacing the security sector? on the files with a default security sector. It did this to over 140,000 files, but afterward it still wouldn't boot. I decided to have another go at it, but now when I try to use the repair console from the XP disk, it says it can't see a copy of windows on the disk to repair. The PATA disk, I should mention, was repaired several times before I wiped it, each time when I did CHKDSK, it found and repaired errors. I have even used the command FIXBOOT & it said it did, but to no avail. At one time I thought my memory might have been stopping it from booting, so I changed out both sticks for a single stick that I had, but no dice. Even after I had put the 2 sticks of memory back in, it did boot up a few times, but now nothing. Long story short---I've tried 4 different drives, all with XP & none will show up in the MB Bios or start windows. I'm now relagated to this Win98 dinosaur I got out of the trash to post this. I need a hand here.