A little off-topic, this is more a h/w issue. I have a desktop PC with an ABIT board - KW7 to be specific. I had a Seagate ST380013AS (80GB) running on SATA fine for about 2 years then it started going bad. I was running Winders so I did the old check/repair disk, happened again so I figured I'd try Kubuntu since I felt more comfortable troubleshooting hardware issues using Linux. Problems later on - would only mount the / file system read only. Ran tune2fs to continue on errors and e2fsck badblock checks - found problems, still wouldn't boot out of read only. I bought two Western Digital WD1600JS (160GB) drives hoping to setup a RAID, but now I can't even get one of the drives recognized by the BIOS. In addition now I can't plug in my failing drive and have it recognized by the BIOS. I can't imagine that I somehow trashed all three drives with static, I'm good about handling drives, done this many times. Nothing I can do anymore will get any one of the 3 SATA drives I have recognized. I thought maybe I fudged a BIOS setting to I cleared CMOS and started over, no luck. Is it possible the onboard SATA controller is toast? Am I using this mobo at risk if so? I was thinking of trying a PCI SATA controller. Unfortunately I don't have another system with SATA to test... Any thoughts? On this same box I noticed a bad memory address using memtest86+ so I pulled that stick. But that was before all these problems. If memtest86 reports a single address failure is the stick pretty much useless? Or can it be used (at risk)? Thanks, Josh