Okay, it's still dead. The reason for that is that I haven't been working on it much. The technical support isn't bad, it's just not helping me with the problem. I'm plotting out my next move, and here's where I'm at:

A couple of weeks ago, I came home to find my machine had apparently rebooted and was frozen attempting to run CHKDSK. The CHKDSK had frozen during the second stage, checking indexes.

What led up to this? Glad you asked:

I'm running an Asus Terminator K7 BYO sytem with a 1.1 GHz Duron, 1G RAM, a 40GB Hard Drive, and an ATI All-In-Wonder 7500 PCI video card. After 3 years, I was running out of space, so I decided to go to Fry's Electronics and pick up a new and even bigger hard drive.

I grabbed a Western Digital 200GB hard drive and took it home.

I opened the box, read the docs, and incomprehensibly decided to use the included software to copy my data from my old drive to the new drive. Ordinarily that would not be a problem, but not on my system. I'm running Windows 2000 with an NTFS file system. As a Microsoft Certified Professional I should have known better.

Everything appeared fine for a while. Then I got the CHKDSK error checking the file indexes. I tried rebooting a couple of times but there was no improvement.

I tried to boot from my old drive (now installed as the D: slave drive on the same cable with the new drive), but that came up with the same CHKDSK problem.

I tried to boot up the Windows 2000 Professional CD so I could use the Windows 2000 repair function, but the repair failed.

My next step was to attempt to reinstall Windows 2000 on the new drive, probably wiping out all of the data on that drive. I went through the entire process of reformatting my 200 GB drive using the Windows 2000 Install function, but at the end of the NTFS format, when it came time to copy files from the CD, I got a STOP: 0000221 {Bad Image Checksum} error.

I used the Western Digital CD Data Software to check out the disk, and it indicated that the entire disk was formatted with the FAT file system.

I wondered if something was wrong with the disk, so I copied the Western Digital diagnostics to a floppy and ran them on my system. I booted up on the floppy, and ran the diagnostics, and they indicated no problems with the C; drive.

At this point I decided to check out my old disk. I opened up the computer and removed the IDE cable from both drives. I removed the jumper on the old drive and connected it to the end of the IDE cable.

I rebooted and got the CHKDSK error again. When I tried to reboot and skip the CHKDSK step, the system appeared to go through the entire boot routine, then flashed a blue screen after the Windows 2000 splash screen, but it was too quick to read before the system rebooted.

OK, it's not the disk. It's not either one of the disks. I probably need some sort of disk manager to handle the 200GB drive, but I think that something else is going wrong with my system. I think my next step is to attempt booting into Safe mode and checking out the event logs to see if they can help me. If I don't get anywhere that way, I'm just about ready to punt and get myself another BYO system. I think I can use the disks, but I'm not sure about my other goodies. Maybe I'll start with the basic BYO system and my disks and some new memory, and add my Graphics card, CD/DVD drive, etc. one upgrade at a time.