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hello, i really need some help here, as i havent the slighest clue (forgive the spelling, the spell check doesnt work under text-mode)
ok, so i guess ill give the full story here just in case...

i kinda got some ideas about how the computer could run a bit better, by removing some flat metal coving the fans on the case, and power supply ..

i stamped out the flat metal on the case, and screwed in a fan cover in its place (one with round metal .. so air flows easyer around)

for the power supply i removed the metal pice on one of its fans (the screws for the metal were on the outside), then i opened the power supply and removed the metal pice for the bigger fan at the bottom ... then i got the idea that the 8x8 cm fan on the power would look better on the case (the pwoer supply had leds on the fans .. bluish ones) .. i remodled the front of the case (took off the plastic peice that had the power/reset buttons, and leds ... i moved the power button to the audio port place (with some sligh cutting and melting of plastic of course) .. i tore off some part of metal on the front-inner case so the fan could both fit, and have semi-descent airflow ...

the power supply whent back to gether eventully (its hard working in such a small and packed aread with hard wires that dont like me), i got 2 new 4ft long IDE cables so i could have the 2 hard drvies as the masters of their own slots, and the cd-rw and dvd drives as seprate slaves ... just so it would seem more organised .. i didnet like the idea of 2 hard drives on the same slot ... all my data was on 1 hard drive (i am currently in the middle of a reinstall, all thats elft is the configuring of the window manager, some fine tuning, and installation of games/other programs) ...

when i put back the computer (testing the fans/power supply first, ... as i did cut and redo some wires ....) i put the main hard drive on the master on the first IDE slot .. just like it had always been (this drive has the boot sector to boot off of), the other devices were connected in the described fasion above (the other drive being the master of the second IDE slot, and the cd/dvd as slaves) ... once i got it to boot (needed to flash the CMOS as it refused show the BIOS screen after the first boot) and minor problems resolved (first i forgot the plug in the power for the cd/dvd drives ... i ended up riping out there jumpers (that set the master/slave state) when they dident act like before)

the real problem was the boot sector on the first ide slot ... the BIOS cant find it, it says theres nothing there, even when i tell it to look both on the first and second IDE slots (just to be safe) still it claims there no boot sector to boot off of, luckly i had a gentoo live cd, i used it to run lilo to refresh the boot sector .. still the BIOS claims there to be no boot sector on the master device of the first IDE slot .... when i run hdparm (i chrooted onto the disk from the install cd ... so i know its still working, and has all my data) i get error messages relating to dma .. mainly that "drive seek error" .. wich has some numbers (hex values that i cant remember) .. it eventulally worked .. the same thing happened when i mounted the device ... also one of the drives seem to have started making a noise, a "eeeeeeeeeeeeee" .. i think it might be coming from the main hard drive (the one that has a boot sector the BIOS cant seem to find) ... and it makes the sound at boot, and lasts a while .... that sound also started to be made a month or 2 ago, but it only lasted 10 seconds or so, and always at random times ... never at boot time (at least that i remember ... if it did it died fast) ....

could this be a sign of a soon to be hard drive failure, or an i just over reacting? ... also is there a way to fix it (mainly get it to boot again .. the BIOS settings arent the problem, i used the some settings as i always have, and tryed the fail safe settings ... the hdparm that was run on the drive as just standard setup (seting some things, nothing that should have broke it, the some ones are used by a lot of people .. also there just default setings the gentoo init scripts provide, as i didnet have time to fully set them .... all in all i only ran that script once or twice a few weeks ago .. long before i took the computer apart, and surely had no problems like i have now0

I would suspect the new ide cables. 4 ft. is awefully long, might be having signal degradation problems. Also, are you running at udma66 or faster. Maybe they aren't 80 conductor cables (the standard 40 condutor cables won't run over udma33. I would recheck the drive jumpers (master, slave) as well. A few ideas for you.

thanks kevinalm, i was able to read your post lucky, but then my dad caned the internet not to long after, so i was unable to post a reply

yes, it was the long cables, im now back to the short cables, but sadly even the short ones are a bit long, i require both a slave and master (the slaved hard drive was making that sound ... so now its just siting there only cuse it needs to be, the bios turns it off so it will stop making that noise (unless i try to use it, for extra space))

and yep, by forcing a lower setting it stoped giving those errors, i think ill just let the bios set it up ...

thanks again