Hardware Guru's opinion needed badly on drive/controller failure

[Gallienus]

I need a well educated opinion on a problem I am currently having with a computer I built. I know there are some references to running winxp but this is more of a hardware question than a winxp or linux question.

Basic facts:
Soyo SY-7VDA motherboard
Cyrix C3-650mhz cpu
ati xpert 128 video card
512 soundblaster sound card
Artec 52X cd-rom drive
256 mb of crucial ram
80gig seagate ultra 100 ide hard drive.

History:
This computer was built around 2 years ago. For the first 18 months the computer with winxp installed it ran fine. It was about this time that norton's antivirus started giving me problems. It would report certain files needed to run norton's were missing. After repeated attempts to uninstall and reinstall norton's antivirus I gave up and decided to wipe the drive clean and reinstall everything.
After repeated attempts to reformat and install windows I thought the hard drive had gone bad and went out and bought a Seagate 80 gig ultra ata100 hard drive and installed it. I also decided to install Suse 9.0 instead of Windows. Suse ran fine until the power supply went. After replacing the power supply and restarting the system Suse crash repeated until finally I decided to install Slackware 10.0.
Slackware ran fine for about a week then I started getting corrupted file system errors. After running fsck for two days the result was the file system had unrecoverable errors. So....needless to say I tried to reformat the dirve and reinstall Slackware 10. Each time I would format the hard drive, checking for errors, and reinstall slack it would start normally and upon a reboot I would get a corrupted file system error and there was nothing I could do to fix it. Even after a fresh install as soon as the computer would restart I would get corrupted file system errors.
Most recently I used the disk that came with the hard drive to repartition, reset the MBR and write zeros to the disk. Now the drive won't even format as ext3 and the system seems to freeze when I try to format and check for errors.
I've tried the different file systems but each time I restart the computer it tells me I have a corrupted file system.

So my question is what is wrong with my system is the onboard hard drive controller going is the mother board shot? If the ide controller is going or gone, are the drives totally screwed?

Any help or opinions are welcome.

[XiaoKJ]

if the ide controller's dead, then the drives may be ok.

but because of the dead ide, much useless info would have been written on the disks, and therefore you have to low-level format it (of course in another computer or something.)

are you sure the drives are ok?

[JohnT]

Built around 2 yrs ago and with only a Cyrix 650 chip? Any solution with the present board spells money. Spend it on an upgraded board.

[MkIII_Supra]

I recommend the following board: ASUS A7V8X (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=590675&Sku=A455-2031&SRCCODE=GOOPROD&CMP=OTC-FROOGLE) this one is going for $60.00, I have had mine for... 2 maybe 3 years now? Can't remember, anyhow, runs my Duron 1.2GHz just fine. It works and allows for you to move to a better CPU as well.

[Gallienus]

Thanks for the responses.

Okay I know this sounds really bad but.....The total use of this computer consists of e-mail, browsing the web, and writing a few recipes in Kword. The only other thing I ever see used is Kpoker and fronzen bubbles when the nieces or nephews are over the grand parents house. So, since I'm on a tight budget and I'm saving to replace my computer which is even older I'm not sure upgrading the mobo and cpu are a wise choice just yet.

As far as the drives being bad. What is the likelihood of two drives seeming to fail the same way on the same computer in less than a year?

[jrbishop79]

you could see if you could get your hands on an ATA card and try plugging the hard drive(s) in that and see if you can work with that. If the drive(s) work with the ATA card, then you know that the hard drive(s) are ok and the controller on the motherboard is bad. I'm not sure how expensive those ATA cards are, but I would imagine that they are cheaper than a CPU/Motherboard.

my $0.02

[JohnT]

I'm on a tight budget and I'm saving to replace my computer which is even older I'm not sure upgrading the mobo and cpu are a wise choice just yet. Upgrading the mobo and cpu "are" your computer...what else is left is just peripheral that can be replaced on a piece-meal basis as you can afford it. In fact it is a wiser choice than buying a new one when its not affordable for you. Building versus buying is always the choice of economy....and fun.:D