Well, I have tried everything I can think of. And so, of course, my last resort is to ask for help here. Is that a surprise?

Problems:
- Slow detection of IDE drives
- Disk I/O Error when booting from Win2K CD
- Once, and only once, a severe graphics "glitch" upon reboot (full screen of colored blocks, characters almost unreadable)

Hardware:
- Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard (PCB Rev 2.0)
- AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton Core)
- 1x Crucial 512MB PC2700 RAM (installed in DIMM1)
- Sapphire ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (black PCB version)
- Western Digital WD1200JB (120GB, 8MB cache) hard drive - primary master
- Lite-On 16101B (16x10x40 CD-RW) drive - secondary master
- Lite-On LTD-163D DVD-ROM drive - secondary slave

And the story goes: I have been able to configure the BIOS to correctly recognize the CPU as an AMD Athlon XP 2500+. I haven't messed with any settings that would affect the memory. After the post, the message "Memory Frequency is at 166MHz" is displayed, and then the extremely slow detection of IDE drives begins. I have swapped out both of the IDE cables, even though the cables and the drives were all previously functional on the old motherboard. But the slowpoke behavior persists.

I want to make sure this behavior isn't because I've configured something incorrectly. Any suggestions or insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Not sure about your specific situation, but I had some growing pains with my Abit NF7-S, another N-Force board. I've solved most of them, but had to make some concessions. My CDR drive flaked out as the secondary master or secondary slave, so I had to move it to the primary IDE chain, and move my 2 hard drives to the secondary master/slave. Don't know why, and the fix makes no sense, but it worked. My floppy drive wasn't working either, and it works in my other system, so maybe I have a bad FDD controller on the board, but I hate floppies anyway, so I'm kinda glad to see it go. I can always boot from a CD.

I see your IDE setup is kinda like mine, the one difference is the NF7-S has the SATA connector, so I'm using my main hard drive off that one (using the "serillel" connector.) It might be more of a hassle for you to move your CD/DVD drives to the primary chain, as you don't have the extra IDE to play with, so you'd have to play with the boot settings to get it to boot from a secondary drive.

Still, might be worth a shot, since your problems sound IDE related.

I see your IDE setup is kinda like mine, the one difference is the NF7-S has the SATA connector, so I'm using my main hard drive off that one (using the "serillel" connector.)

Are you telling me that you have an adapter that allows you to run an IDE drive on the Serial ATA port? If so, I find that rather interesting. But I don't see why I'd want to do it, unless one or both of my regular IDE channels are bad.

So, since changing the drive configuration is the only thing I haven't tried yet (all drives and cables worked set up this way on a different motherboard), I'll give that a shot.

Are you telling me that you have an adapter that allows you to run an IDE drive on the Serial ATA port? If so, I find that rather interesting. But I don't see why I'd want to do it, unless one or both of my regular IDE channels are bad.

The NF7-S has 4 connectors for drives. IDE1, IDE2, SATA1, and SATA2. The board also comes with an adaptor ("serillel" they call it) which lets you use one of the SATA connectors as an extra IDE device (just one per connector, no master/slave stuff.) If I wanted, I could buy another serillel adaptor to add another drive to the SATA2 connector.

There's no *great* advantage to running IDE on the SATA as I'm doing, except that it frees up the other IDE chains for other devices. Some day I will get a fast SATA drive (the new WD 10000 RPM ones look great) but for now, it's nice to have the flexibility of two extra IDE devices.

Some day I will get a fast SATA drive...

That's why I bought this motherboard: plenty of USB ports, FireWire, SATA; lots of room for expansion. If I can get the darn thing to behave properly. I'll RMA it if I have to, but if the replacement behaves the same way, then I'll be looking elsewhere.

Yeah, well, I just thought the primary/secondary IDE thing was worth mentioning since it solved my problems. Worth a shot before going through the hassle of an RMA.

Do you know whether that adapter works for just your mobo or any SATA connection? At the moment I have an ATA100 PCI card taking up room for my third hard drive. I certainly don't need to boost performance on it (it's only 5200RPM), but it would be nice to take that out of there just in case.

I will now go look for some info on this mysterious adapter

Well, it came to the point where I decided either the motherboard was broken, or I was. As it turns out, this time, it was me.

My problem didn't have anything to do with which drives were on which IDE channel. Instead, I discovered it had to do with jumper settings. The WD's standard jumper settings are Slave, Master w/Slave, or Single. Well I had it set as Master w/Slave. On the old Dell motherboard, it didn't seem to matter, even though the drive was alone on the channel. On the Asus motherboard, apparently, it matters. When I removed the jumper (no jumper sets it as Single), it quickly detected the drive and continued right along booting.

So I was broken, but I'm better now. Thanks for your thoughts, though, Tony.