my computer radomly restarts and when i shut down to restart it sometimes gives me a invalid boot disk error. i re-installed xp on a different hd which is a sata. i have 4 other disks on the machine that are ide. i changed the sata cable tried a different hd different power cord updated the bios. took out my sound card which is a sb live 5.1 platinum. i did a full virus scan on all the drives. i cant find any bulges in the capacitors on the motherboard. i tested the power connections for the ps. the ps has cables that can be removed so i swapped them as well with spares. the only other options i can think of is to try a different sata slot try a different video card or assume the motherboard has a short. any other ideals on what steps to take would be appreciated. oh and the error code shown in even viewer is 100000f7 which i could not find?

did you load the sata raid array driver from the motherboard disk?
then, install those drivers when windows install disk asks for it by pressing f6??
its the only way xp- will load the sata disk drivers

all drivers from live update were installed
no drivers were installed previously and this board has been working for the past year i just started having issue a couple of days ago. that sounds like an option if i would want to mirror or stripe my drives which i don't.

The SATA drivers are not something supplied by MSoft. They come from the MBoard manufacturer.

Go to Device manager> IDE ATA?ATAPI controllers. Is there a listing for a Serial ATA controller? If so, double click it and choose proamry channel. Transfer mode should be Serial ATA. Run the speed test there and post back the results.

i will try that to give you the speed results. i'm also going to make sure that memory is set to spred spectrum since the memory is from two different brands. and will also make sure that power management is disabled in bios and in the os. i've also noticed that i have the sata 1 drive plugged into sata 2 even though sata 2 is backwards compatible it might still create a problem. i will also re-install the system drivers from the mb website.

Run memtest86 overnight or try one RAM stick at a time.
Check your temperatures.
Reseat the motherboard power connector.

i have a memory test from microsoft but i will try memtest and one stick at time. the temperature does not exceed 109 and i reseated all the connections.

okay i reset all the settings to factory default in the bios. i installed the system drivers from the mb website. i noticed that even though it detects sata in device manager it was not seeing the drive. the sata drive is my c drive i went properties and clicked on the correct drive then i was asked to restart since there was a hd change? speed is
theoretical limit 300
burst speed... 141.5
sustained speed 60.8
the drive is still plugged in sata 2 my pc does not see the drive when plugged in sata 1

From what you have said, it sounds like your first SATA controller has been dying and finally went completely dead.

Either that or a flaky cable connection.

sorry what i meant when i said sata 2 i meant sata II. i have 8 ports for sata 1-4 are for SATA II and 5-8 are for SATA I. for whatever reason the order it shows is 2.1.3.4 so i had it plugged into slot 2 thinking it was slot 1. i know it sounds confusing but so far it has not restarted.

nevermind spoke to soon it restarted once again

under event viewer error log it shows a faultrep.dll error. i also changed to not restart when an error occurs so i can see the blue screen for the exact error code