I just installed a new mobo (A7v600) and my hard drive wouldnt boot in windows. But sometimes i got lucky, and out of maybe 40 tries it would boot once. I tried putting in a new ide cable and i managed to boot once after that. I thought it might be due to the hardware change so i performed a clean install of mandrake. I'm still getting the disk boot failure message and didnt manage to load linux.

What is surprising is that the hard drive functions perfectly and can be accessed otherwise. I did not get any errors during installation, but things seemed quite laggy, as i had to wait many minutes between steps. I also "lost" the mouse during installation as it was first recognized then stopped working.

So is there a way i could at least boot into the os from a cd or a floppy? I read something about putting the bootloader on a floppy...

linux rescue also reports "drive not ready for command" and "error waiting for DMA" while it loads.

It's probably a hardware problem from what you describe. First thing I'd check is the jumpering on the hard drive. If that's OK, go into your bios setup program and see how the bios sees the hd and make sure the bios is set to boot off the drive.

boot up and post what you see when the bios registers drives.

how many ide devices on that cable?
have you ran scandisk, or fsck on the drive?
do you have a.....watever distro, oh mandrake setup disk, it should double as a boot disk..

is the drive overheating?