A8n-e wows
 

So much for saying good things about a product. A little while ago I
responded to a post from a prospective buyer inquiring about the a8n-e
board from asus. Well guess what, it appears my board just went south on me.
This morning while I was working I appeared to be having some problems with
a storage drive on ide-0. Eventually I was no longer able to reboot into
windows xp with that drive connected. Eventually I discovered that anything
else placed on the drive interface interferred with rebooting and once in
windows the components were not recognized. I also discovered that when
transferrign the original harddrive to ide-1 I was able to boot into xp and
work with the drive--for a while at least. Now it appears that anything
placed on either ide channel is not recognized and stalls the boot process.
..

An rma is going to take at least a month, and I do not have that kind of
time. So if any magicians out there cannot not come up with a quick fix (and
this would be greatly appreciated)--, I am thinking of purchasing a new
processor and motherboard and tranferrign my components from the old system
into a new one. I am currently running the a8n-e, with an amd 64 3000, a 160
g sata system drive, a 122g video storage drive, a leatdtek 6600-gt video
card, 1g crucial ram , audigy 2 sz platinum and windows xp service pack 2.

Any suggestions on a motherboard? I want to addto firewire but have no
interest in sli. Asus apparantly does not have such a beast. I have recently
built an xp system with an msi k7n2gm-v motherboard and was impressed but I
have no particular preferences--except for avoiding soyo(one year running
and no rebate).

Any suggestions or opinions concerning possible repair or a recommended
motherboard/cpu combo would be greatly appreciated. Looking for a sweet spot
performance and price-wise.