i have an abit VH6T that uses a VIA ATA100 primary ide channel. i get the blinking cursor after the "verifying dmi pool" too when the 60GB Maxtor is connected to the primary channel. in the post it also detects "LAXTNR" instead of "MAXTOR" in the primary channel. if i change it to the regular secondary channel, it detects and boots xp fine. i've changed the driver from the via published driver, to the microsoft driver, and to the standard dual channed ide driver. the bloody first channel wont boot from the hard drive. if i connect a cdrom drive to it, xp will detect a "CDRNM" instead of "CDROM" and xp cant read any of the "bad media" on the disc in the cdrom. the spelling errors of the drives in the post concern me. anyone know why they are misspelled? i have searched for the .inf for the controller so i could F6 in the installation, but can't find it. i have the 80 conductor wire. i have a severe migraine from this problem. please help, thanks

the fact that you are seeing a n-intead of an o- strikes me as a bit add, try a bios upgrade and there is a chance that you have some form of boot virus, contact your motherboeard manufacturer or bios manufaturer and be carefull with the bios upgrade

I used to have a gigabyte motherboard that had the same problem. i flashed the bios and it didn't work. that's why i replaced the whole board with an abit board. it has had the same problem since the beginning. is it possible to clean up a boot virus?