Conclusion: bad hard drive or a virus.

I inventoried the system: an 800Mhz Athlon, two 128MB PC133 DIMMs, an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 Pro (AGP), a SoundBlaster Live! soundcard, and a 3-Com 100Mbps Ethernet card on an ASUS A7V with two IDE controllers (UDMA66 and UDMA100). Two 40GB Western Digital hard drives sat as Master and Slave on the UDMA100 controller. A Plextor CD-RW drive was Master on the Primary of the UDMA66, with a Maxtor 30GB hard drive connected as the Secondary Master.

Surprisingly, the first Western Digital was configured at 7GB, but the second scanned as 40GB. Since one identified correctly, I suspected a drive problem. I pulled all three and checked jumper settings, moving each to a test machine and setting them as single drives. When the first WD booted to Win2K, I recovered over 14GB of MP3s, a My Documents, and an extensive Favorites folder. I checked the disk for errors and found none.

The second Western Digital tested out as well.

The Maxtor was not as lucky. It failed to POST, even after resetting the jumpers. I ran Maxtor’s disk tools, which reported unrecoverable errors.

The client decided to take this opportunity to upgrade to an 80GB Maxtor UDMA133 drive with 8MB cache and a 200MB Maxtor UDMA133 drive with 8MB cache. They also decided to replace the video card with a new ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder 9000 (AGP) card and added 1.5GB of PC133 RAM (3 x 512MB). I set the system BIOS to boot to AGP with 64MB support (to match the memory on the card). I then changed the system settings to Optimal, with support for PC133 memory, and to scan the memory BIOS for proper timing settings. With the floppy connected, the system booted.

Next, I added expansion cards. Since the AGP slot and the first PCI slot share an IRQ, I decided to fill the remaining slots. Slot 2 took the UDMA133 controller. Slot 3 held the SoundBlaster Live! Slot 4 took an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) card. Slot 5 remained for the 3-Com network card. I disabled the on-board soundcard and the UDMA100 controller on the motherboard, as these devices conflicted with two of the expansion cards. I then connected the two hard drives to the Maxtor UDMA133 controller, and the system recognized both drives.

However, the system would not boot to either hard drive or to the CD-RW drive. The network card was PXE-compatible, its BIOS repeatedly attempting a network boot. I removed the network card and the system booted from the CD-RW drive. I installed the Promise drivers for the Maxtor controller during the Windows 2000 Setup (by pressing the F6 key during initialization) and completed installation of the operating system.

After reinstalling the network card and configuring the network connections, I loaded Service Pack 4 and all the Windows Updates for the system. I then installed the VIA 4-in-1 drivers, which are needed to appropriately recognize all the devices on the ASUS motherboard. I continued to install the remainder of the client’s applications, to include Office XP Professional and Easy CD/DVD Creator 6 and their associated updates. During these installations, I noted the system would become sluggish and occasionally lockup. I thought it might be a heat problem, but there were plenty of fans and ventilation to the system. I conducted some performance testing on the system, and noticed a surprising amount of network activity that I could not account for. At that point, I completed an update of Norton Anti-Virus 2003 and was alarmed when the system reported being thoroughly infested with a backdoor RPC virus!

In performing a default installation, not wanting to lock my client out of the Administrator account, I left the password blank. While patching the system, this virus logged in as Administrator and began sending messages to its master. I was not satisfied with the cleaning procedures outlined on Symantec’s website, so I decided to perform a clean installation of the system (yep — I started all over again!)

Two lessons learned: NEVER perform an installation with a blank password on any account that has system privileges and install an up-to-date version of your anti-virus software BEFORE you connect your system to the Internet.

With everything reloaded, the system still locked up! I wondered if the expansion cards might be causing conflicts. The Maxtor installation instructions require the controller be placed in a bus-mastering slot (one of the first three after the AGP card), but I wasn’t aware of special requirements for the remaining cards. The ASUS website revealed a known conflict on the AV7 board when a Maxtor controller and a SoundBlaster Live! are installed together. This error was corrected with the latest BIOS update. My client’s board was version 1006, so I flashed it to the latest version (1011).

The system remained stable awhile, but locked again. I hit the Web to learn more about bus-mastering, which involves the ability of PCI cards to share resources and take over the system bus for heavy data requirements. Though I didn’t notice any specific requirements for bus-mastering expansion cards, I noticed most lockups occurred during network operations. Perhaps the network card needed bus-mastering as well. I moved the 3-Com card to Slot 1 and rebooted. There were no more lockups and no more excess network traffic. The upgrade was complete!