Heres an interesting one...

MSI K7T266Pro2 mobo with Athlon XP 2000+, all on default settings, no overclocked. The box is for webserver/boinc and is on 24/7.

Sometimes during the day, but mostly at night Windows 2000 Pro reports unsafe removal of hardware... DVD drive, tape drive, zip drive. I have to reboot and then they will be fine.

I have tried removing all drives apart from one and that failed, then tested a different one by itself and that failed. These drives work perfectly fine in another box. I never had this problem or similar when running XP or linux on this machine, its only since 2k was put on. It has sp4 and all updates installed.

Thanks in advance for any help.

It could be a loose PCI card or other component. Another possibility is bad cabling. Or a buggy Windoze install.

MRD said:

It could be a loose PCI card or other component. Another possibility is bad cabling. Or a buggy Windoze install.

Click to expand...

If you installed Windows while OC'd there's a good chance that you do have a corrupted installation; I know from personal experience that XP (and possibly by extension, or even to a greater extent 2K) is picky about that and somewhat fragile.

It could also be the "night noises" Stuck pins into a Bill Gates voodoo doll or done some other un-Microsoft-acceptable thing lately?

Have you tried a different IDE cable or a different molex connector, perhaps the drive is losing power occasionally.