I have a 10-year-old desktop computer with Windows XP on one drive and Ubuntu 10.4 on the second drive. The first is an old IDE disk, the second a more modern SATA drive. Tried to boot Ubuntu, and got a lot of arcane i/o errors that I am sorry I can't repeat verbatim but there was something about unable to read sector this or sector that, among other things. I thought maybe the drive was hosed. Tried booting into recovery mode to see if I could figure anything out but it was too geeky for me. Then I tried rebooting Ubuntu to see if I could look at the errors again but now the system insists on going into recovery mode.

Then I tried booting windows, which as I mentioned is on a different physical drive. The MS logo comes up and then it reboots spontaneously and we're back where we started.

Any ideas? Should I suspect the second drive is seriously damaged, or could there be some problem with the motherboard?

Many thanks.

I might be thinking that the motherboard (or some chip on it) is suspect.
If you get a (grub) boot menu, the filesystem on that drive is good enough to show that. If you get the Windows logo, then you've also gotten to that drive and read its filesystem (presumably NTFS).
Sounds like (common) dodgy hardware.

Thanks.

So -- I need to come up with a plan. It looks like the board is an ASUS P4P 800WM, a few years old. It has 1GB RAM and the CPU is a Pentium 4 @2.4 GHz.

Do you suppose I should replace it with the same motherboard or its successor, and add some RAM while I'm at it?

The other option that occurs to me, in the meantime, is to get one of those USB/hard drive enclosure thingies, remove the drives and mount them on another computer so I can get at the data. (My wife's iTunes library is not backed up anywhere else!)

The external enclosure is a good first option - it'll (at least) prove if the drives are the problem. I made sure I got one that could do both IDE and SATA - might be hard(er) to get these days. I also got another for laptop drives, just in case ...

I've always found getting (new) motherboards to fit old chips is a problem - the manufacturers only want to sell "latest-and-greatest". Might be cheaper and easier to toss it altogether and buy a complete system. Memory can be a real issue.

It looks like maybe http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131622 will accept my old CPU and memory. If it won't support my memory, I could replace it. But either way I will go for the hard drive enclosure ASAP because it will be some time before I have time to tear this old beast apart and give it a major organ transplant.

Thanks again.