Spent a miserable nite last night banging my head against a wall.

Got new mobo installed with my old CPU. I was able to boot all the way into a linux install I was working on before the mobo swap for the first time, which was a good indicator for me. But the install was corrupted before, so obviously I was going to re-do it from scratch anyway. And I decided to do Windows first anyway. So I wiped the HD from a 3rd party fdisk util (from the Ultimate Boot Disk, good stuff, google it) and was gonna boot to CD and install Windows.

It wouldn’t boot. I wrestled with that one for an hour or so before disconnecting my SATA drive, which is connected to a PCI SATA adapter since my mobo lacks that capability. CDs will boot now. Ok, go to Windows setup. Hit enter to begin setup, bam STOP 0×8E. From 8pp-11pm I worked on that and never figured it out. Only remaining things to try are remove the SATA adapter entirely, same for firewire (both of these had been in my computer for a year), and other hardware measures like new RAM. Microsoft says 0×8E can be caused by bad RAM, but I think its unlikely that both RAM chips are bad because that would mean that my old mobo AND RAM were bad, AND the RAM failures don’t show up on an extensive RAM diag util running overnight. (I did try installing one stick then the other individually.)

This shouldn’t be that hard! And I am extremely curious to know if a new Kubuntu Linux install would succeed…

### Update July 23rd ###
Jeez. Finally got my PC back up. It’s been up now for about 5 days. The main culprit was that my Western Digital 160 GB SATA drive was going bad, and nothing worked right with the drive plugged in. The other difficulty was that I couldn’t install Windows to my new 250 GB SATA RAID 1 array without installing a driver from a floppy disk. Floppy disk? I have 3 computers in my house and no floppy drives! Had to buy one, but never got the process right so I skipped it by installing to my 40 GB PATA drive. I might ghost it over later.