Okay.. here's the dilemma.

I get home turn on my pc and all I hear is: click-click *pause* click-click *pause* for a total of eight sets.

My video card's fan sounds like it is reving up and down a few times... no video. 9800 gt 512 pny card.

I am dual booting windows 7 64bit and xp pro 32bit. Windows 7 is on my 500gb sata blue caviar... the XP resides on the old IDE hard drive.

I pulled the card and used the onboard video.. sure.. that works. The click-click does not stop.

When I get to my dual boot and go to windows 7 it gives me an i/o error 0xc0000e9 "unexpected i/o error". Googling that did a bit, but not much.

I keep the videocard pulled and try the older pcie card I had in... no go on the output. Last time I used the card it worked.

Then pull the SATA drive... the click-click stops. I slam that as a slave and windows xp has issues recognizing it... it sees it.. and when I check the hard drive status with CrystalDiskInfo10 it first says it's bad.. then good. I run the tester from WD and it says it's good. Mind you my two PATA drives are fine.

I rebooted to check some bios stuff... tried to start up winxp and it flashed a blue screen and rebooted. I pulled the SATA out and it worked fine. I then threw it into the third sata connection and it booted up windows, but now crystaldisk and the WD program say there are errors.

Okay.. so clearly shit went to hell somewhere. I had problems a year or so ago with the 1&2 RAM slots posting bad.. so I moved my ram to 3/4 and didn't have a problem.

Does this sound like a motherboard going tits up on me?
If the SATA fails would that take down the videocard as well - or vice versa?
DId I just get lucky enough to have a videocard *and* hard drive failure?

If it was just the videocard the older one should have worked. My guess is the slot's dead. As is the SATA ones..

Does that sound about accurate? A cursory search tells me 2 PATA connectors (4 or more max drives), DDR2, AM2 motherboard combos are a bit hard to find. I might have to bite the bullet and go new motherboard, chip, and ram... hopefully not drive and videocard.

.... and a new motherboard and sata dvd burner is on the way.. only 89 bones.