I think I may have fried my hardware.....
Noisy made a serious error the other day when he plugged in his new hard drive without the PC being off. (The PC was shut down, but the switch on the back of the PSU wasn't off).
When I went to boot up using the original hardware configuration, the HDD got as far as the windows 2000 splash screen, but then hung.
Attempts to recover the OS using scandisk and buggering about with MS-DOS have all failed. Interrogating the drive as a slave in another machine will allow me to recover my documents etc. but I haven't done that yet.
Using a known good HDD, I attempted to install win 98 on the machine, but it gets so far and then just restarts the machine. (I don't have a good win 2000 OS disk)
The BIOS appears to be OK. it identifies all of the hardware correctly. I have verified that the IDE cables are OK using an Ohm meter. The PSU is making all of the right volts. I can't see any damage on the HDDs driver board.
Is it possible that my motherboard could have developed a problem that means it cannot support an OS?
I've run out of ideas. The Mobo is an Asrock KS78X with a 2.8GHz Athlon processor and over a gig of RAM.
Are there any more simple tests I can perform before I start spending money?
Thanks,
N