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Kaitlyn Luna · Guest

This was my original setup.
IDE1M: WD 120G
IDE1S: empty
IDE2M: Sony CRX320E combo drive
IDE2S: NEC ND-3540A DVD
SATA1: empty
SATA2: empty
My BIOS is 02/23/06 which I installed in May.

One morning, I powered up and found Win2000 wouldn't start. I'll skip
what I did next and just say when I tried to boot Knoppix I got hda: lost
interrupt errors. (For those who don't know Linux, hda = master on IDE1.)
The bootable CDs of Partition Commander and Acronis True Image would work
(the latter also giving hda: lost interrupt errors), albeit very slowly.
I booted the DOS version of WD's Data Lifeguard for DOS from floppy and
the hard drive passed all tests.

To avoid prolonged downtime, I got a WD 320G SATA drive and put it on
SATA1. Then I tried moving the optical drives from IDE2 to IDE1. I booted
Acronis and started getting the same errors. I moved the optical drives
back to IDE2, making this my final setup:
IDE1M: empty
IDE1S: empty
IDE2M: Sony CRX320E combo drive
IDE2S: NEC ND-3540A DVD
SATA1: WD 320G
SATA2: empty
Under this configuration, I restored from DVD-RW backups and everything
is working fine -- except that IDE1 has obviously gone south on me.

Is this somehow fixable or a sign the motherboard is dying?