a7n8x dlx corrupting my hdds?!@ PLEASE HELP

[staticc]

ok ill start with my hardware setup.
-Asus a7n8x deluxe motherboard link here
-Athlon XP 2500 'barton' chip (clocked at stock. 166*11)(1.8ghz)
-two Seagate 160GB 7200rpm EIDE Barracuda hdd's. link here
-two CORSAIR MEMORY XMS 512MB 32MX8 PC-3200C2 W/ Heat Spreader
-koolance liquid cooling tower. link here
-koolance CPU-200G heatsink link here
...

ok i started by making a fat32 partition with bootdisks from partition magic 7.0.
then i formatted it with format.com off a win98se bootdisk. it said something about formatting 20gb? but formatted all 160 *shrug*.

now, i installed windows 2000 pro (regular. no sp's). updated to sp4.. when i rebooted it said 'error ntldr is missing' so i figured i could fix it. so i rebooted with the win98se bootdisk and looked at the c: drive. c:\winnt and all my files were deleted. and replaced with random gibberish files and folders.. corrupted completely.

so, i formatted with the 98se bootdisk again. installed win2k again. downloaded sp4.. worked this time. so i hooked up a old harddrive of mine as a slave to transfer old files onto it, messed around on the net while i waited.. froze during the end, rebooted. 'missing operating system, hit any key to restart' so i booted with the 98se disk again.. went to c:.. 'dir' and 'invalid media type, unable to read drive' so i formatted... again..

after formatting this time, i was thinking.. maybe that harddrive is faulty. so i swapped the two 160s.. slave for master, master for slave. installed win2k pro. again. updated to sp4. again.. after a while.. goofin off talkin to people. downloading stuff, just *reboot* restarts itself. and once again all my files are missing. everything replaced with corrupted gibberish. even the partition labels get filled with random ascii characters. so now.. im stumped.

i realized one thing, the two drives on the ultra ata ide cable.. are wrong, slave is at the end (black) master is in the middle (white) and blue on the motherboard. but i doubt having the master and slave on the wrong spots on the cable could cause any harm.. could it? if so why not earlier?. and also...
could my problem be i formatted with such a old floppy? win98se?
or is it a messed up bios setting thats doing something to my drives?

PLEASE help, this is very very frustratiing. im about to put it all in the microwave and be done with it.

Thanks in advance
Derek

 

[mechBgon]

Welcome to the Forums staticc. May I ask why you're bothering with either the FAT32 or the Win98 floppy? You can have Win2000's setup CD format in either FAT32 or NTFS, and NTFS is sensible IMHO

The first thing I'd suggest is backing down your memory timings to 2.5-3-3-7 and set memory voltage to 2.7 volts, if you haven't already.

Nextly, try a different IDE cable for the heck of it.

Also, is this all being powered by a high-quality brand of power supply like Enermax or Antec? And pretty beefy, say 350W+?

Good luck, hope it works out without too much fuss

 

[staticc]

yes i forgot to include the powersupply
Antec 480W Power Supply TRUE480.

i havent touched any memory settings in the bios.. think that would help anything?
and also with the win2k cd i used. would only let me create NTFS partitions. dont know, just thought id stick with FAT32. because i plan on dual booting slackware later on. if i can solve this corrupting problem.

and i didnt have any other floppies that would just get me to DOS and let me look around, format etc.
i got that 98se disk off bootdisk.com.. i tried the newest dos floppy off there. didnt recognize any of my harddrives. *shrug*

thanks for the reply

 

[mechBgon]

I see, that makes sense.

I would definitely go into the BIOS and change the memory timings, and I forgot to mention that the first thing to do is to set the memory to run at 100% of the CPU's FSB speed, so they're synchronous. I happen to have the same board, CPU and RAM (three sticks) and I do 2-3-3-6 @ 2.7 volts @ 166MHz to sync with my 2500+'s fsb base speed of 166MHz (DDR333).

Nice picks on your parts, great to see quality stuff all the way around