Hello all! I finally created a forum name, been lurking around tom,s for years and years. I am having a problem that has me completely stumped. I will try to give you guys as much info as possible.

I just build the following system:
850watt OCZ power supply
Asus pk5-SE w/asus EPU motherboard 4xSATA ports 1xPIDE
4gb (2x2gb) ocz ddr2 800
intel e8400 cpu
16x IDE dvd rom (master)
120gb IDE hard drive (slave) (previous OS drive)
500gb SATA hard drive (now also has Xp see below)
xp pro

When I first put it together none of the IDE devices were recognized. I removed the SATA drive, and the 6 case USB ports. When i did that, the IDE drives showed up, but when I let it boot off the IDE drive, before the XP splash screen it had a VERY quick BSoD and then would restart. I figured the old drive crapped out. Tried the xp repair feature and it seemed to go through ok. If fixed the BSoD error but a new problem showed up. The system would now hang at the xp splash screen indefinitely.

Again, I figured it was probably the hard drive so I installed a fresh copy of XP pro (sp3) on a 10gb partition of the SATA drive. It too seems to lock at the splash screen.

Currently I find that if I completely unhook ALL PIDE devices it boots ok, but as soon as I hook either the IDE hdd or the IDE dvd drive up the system locks at the splash screen. I have tried many jumper/drive combos and it seems any time the IDE is hooked up it locks at the splash screen.

I have had it boot successfully with all drives hooked up in safe mode, but not in safe mode with networking. And when I try to install drivers in safe mode i get an error and it wont let me. Does anyone have any light to shed on this issue? I'm getting close to RMA...

UPDATE: I unhooked the SATA hdd and put a xp load on the IDE hard drive, I can get it to boot (takes a hwile at teh "windows is starting" screen). But it boots. As soon as i shut down and connect a CD drive to the same IDE cable as the HDD the system goes back to locking up at the XP splash screen. I have tried the DVD as master and HD as slave, vice versa, and both on CSEL modes and it produces the same result each time. However, i can boot into safe mode with both connected. Any clues?

Well i disconnected teh SATA drive, and finally got both the CD rom and the IDE HDD to read at the same time, updated windows, and it seemed to work ok... Until i tried to install stuff, and there are LOTS of corruptions and wierd errors. For a while any of the desktop property tabs would crash and error, and installshield is having MAJOR problems, I pretty much cant install anything. It would error -5001 for various reasons. I tried to repair the install shield but it kept trying to make the temp folder d:\ which is my DVD. I couldnt get the LAN drivers or the audio drivers to install at all either. Both having installshield errors.

It seemed to me that XP was corrupted. I figured that it may be b/c i had an old XP cd and had to update the service packs manually, so i picked up a sp2 xp cd(totally legit) and tried to format/reinstall.

The sp2 CD would start loading and then error 7 when loading the kernel from the CD. ("file \i386\vgaoem.fon error code is 7" ) I looked at the CD, its totally fine, tried to boot from it on my other computer and it launched the setup perfectly.

I am giving up with these crazy problems and getting an EVGA A1 board RMAing this p5k-se, as it seems to me as the IDE/SATA controller is messed up.