Hello! My first post here, and no doubt not my last if my PC is anything to go by.

Every four or five times I start up my PC, I get the “sorry…but Windows failed to start normally” screen (the black screen of fury I call it). Start normally and last good config don’t work and I have to go into safe mode. Events log shows these two errors at startup:

Disk The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D.
atapi A parity error was detected on \Device\Ide\IdePort1.

What does this mean exactly? And how to fix it? I am using Win XP Home SP 2. If it helps, I’ve just had an ASRock P4VM890 motherboard put in and also installed a Lexmark X5470 printer. I had a problem with “PCI Simple Communications Controller” continuously popping up but have hopefully shut it up by feeding it a modem driver, so I guess that isn’t the problem now. Apart from the startup nonsense, the PC works fine. Please help before I break my monitor, or before my monitor breaks my hand!

Hi and welcome to D-A-L

is everything seated properly?

is the hard drive new?

how many IDE devices (HDD, CD/DVD) are connected

Hello!

The hard drive is not new. So, there's a HDD, a CD-ROM drive, a DVD drive. I'll check for any more. I take it by "seated" you mean is everything plugged in the right places on the motherboard? I hope so, it was a PC repair workshop that put it in and they took long enough about it! It isn't on the internet either, if that helps any.

how old is the hard drive?

was it the PC shop that put the hard drive, why did they use a used one?

if you go start......settings........Control Panel ....System...........Hardware..............Device Manager are there any yellow question marks?

The hard drive is about four years old now, it was new when they put it in (this was when I bought the whole system, a buildy-up). I just got a new motherboard recently because something inside the old one was knackered and was preventing switch on. This was from another PC shop, as the original one has moved away. I'm not impressed with the new shop at all, hence I'm looking for answers here - I'm not convinced they could fix anything without something going wrong

There are no yellow question marks. I had one at PCI Simple Communications Controller but I downloaded a modem driver off the net and it hasn't appeared since. I have one disabled device, VIA Ethernet something or other, that has been always been disabled. Enabling it doesn't seem to make any difference.

Since installing my printer, a Lexmark hard drive has appeared in the device manager under hard drives, and on the My Computer screen a Removable Drive F appears. There are no outdated drivers that I know of.

your printer has it got slots for media cards?

have you got any discs with the motherborad?

There is one disc with the motherboard. The printer is a PictBridge one with several slots for memory cards.

For now, I've enabled the Via Ethernet adapter just to see if it makes any difference, so far the only thing different is the warning in the taskbar about a network cable being unplugged. I also updated my sound card driver as Windows decided it was needing it

the Removable Drive F is from the printer.

how do you connect to the internet?

I don't have the internet and never have. In the internet section, though, I have a dial-up Wanadoo icon and a high speed connection (VIA Ethernet adapter) icon. The computer was net ready when I bought it, but my house wasn't

Turning off the Ethernet thingy didn't do anything, the startup error keeps coming up

what caused the original error to warrant the motherboard change?.

it could well be your hard drive is cream crackered