ok well heres the really weird thing that will either let you know whats going on or blow ur mind or sumthing, i can actually format it with ntfs, but when i do that windows cannot install, it says it fails to install everything. Quite odd, anyways i'll try and do sum diagnostics and such and maybe i'll zero the drive but im not going to do it right away cause i am sick of fixing computers at the moment, everything that could go wrong has this week.
Here is a recap, got a new motherboard yay, lets install it, oops didn't remove drivers windows xp is mad, repair installation, no go, swap original board back in, no go, repair install, no go, try to figure out how to get rid of the drivers from mandrake, can't mess with windows partitions, no go, guess i'll just use knoppix to move stuff around, computer froze, huh weird restart, oh great processor is fried, pos case with no airflow, so anyways my xp 2500 got here today bye bye 2400 stupid 256k l2 cache is gone for good, still pissed it died on me. anywho as soon as i get my new hsf and case in the mail i'll be building my new system.
anyways lets see if the new info i just gave you helps at all, i'll see what i can do about diags.
Btw knoppix is a linux distro that boots and runs entirely from the cd, it is suprisingly quick for running from the cd rom and ram, it gives sumone new to linux a very nice experience it is also good for recovering files. I actually plan to install knoppix on a system once i have a box i can dedicate to it because so far knoppix is actually my favorite distro, ive used redhat 9, mandrake 10, and 8 i believe, a suse live demo disk, and maybe another can't remeber, but given that i am basically linux retarded knoppix comes with the built in features that i want and need. 2 cents