Sorry for the length of this email. 

Okay this one has me stumped and I may need to take it for a third opinion, second opinion comes from the list :-)

I have a PC that I built myself about 2 years ago. It has an ASUS P2-99 mobo. I bought (accumulated) a new for me, but old P166 PC that I decided to network with my main PC. I also bought a new 40Gb hard drive and a promise ultra66 ide controller card.

I have 4 working hard drives. One of them a Seagate 2Gb and the rest are all Western Digital and IDE devices - all different sizes.

Since I bought the 40Gb drive, I've been trying to figure out the best installation for me (ie which drive into which machine). In doing this, I've been reformatting, the drives (except one with data on it). 

I do not use the power button at all and have preferred using key combinations on the keyboard to power up my machine. I always leave my PC powered down during the day or when I'm not working on them. 

The last 2 weeks, we our normal winter storms bashing our city (Cape Town, South Africa). Sun been shining again this week - yay. 

The problem is, one day last week, when I got home, I noticed that my PC was powered up. So I logged onto Windows and noticed that the time was strange. On closer inspection, I saw that the date had been changed to 1996. Which suggested to me that the BIOS had been reset. I changed the BIOS setting and everything appeared to be fine. The rest of the details are a bit fuzzy, because I can't remember the order of things and I can't remember if I actually logged onto the Internet that night. I can't even remember if I changed any drives around that night. 

Anyway, at the same time, we had a problem with our phone line that the telco's techies needed to sort out. The techie suggested to me (quite a humerous suggestion to me) that the problem was that my modem (which was switched off during above episode with the BIOS). He suggested that the modem caused a short circuit that brought my telepone service down. At the time I laughed at the suggestion, but then I started wondering if above episode above with the BIOS and this episode could be related. 

This is now especially important knowledge, because my mobo, now does not want to recognise any one of my hard drives correctly on the Primary controller on the mobo. The secondary controller does read the drives correctly. 

The problem is I can't get Windows (or Linux for that matter) installed on my other PC. 

My feeling is the mobo's power has gone awry somewhere. Can anyone back up my suspicions or suggest any other alternatives. Or suggest something that I have not thought of. (I think I've tried everything in the book and few tricks that are not). 

Cheers
Brendon

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