This is, of course, what I get for the hubris of building a computer from parts.

I got a new motherboard (an Intel D865PERLL), a new processor (a P4 2.6GHz), new memory, new power supply (to support the P4 extra power connector), and two SATA hard drives.

I'm having two distinct fatal problems.

1. When trying to install Windows 2000, when it gets to the point where it seems like it's still in text mode, but it changes fonts slightly, the video card I was using, an nVidia P50 I got out of a Dell machine, it doesn't show the screen with the new font. It just goes black and stays that way. The CDROM churns and sounds like it's continuing with the install, but I can't be sure. An older nVidia card I have doesn't even get that far (but it was half broken when I stopped using it, so it might be more broken now). Both of them are AGP cards. An ATI PCI video card I have lying around seems to avoid this problem. Is it a driver problem or an AGP problem? And what can I do about it?
   
   
2. I got those SATA drives because the motherboard has RAID0 for SATA only. Of course, I get the motherboard and RAID is supported only under WinXP. When I use the ATI card and get far enough to partition the drives, it can't see them. I've tried the default BIOS mode for ATA/IDE, which doesn't show me any drives, and legacy BIOS mode for ATA/IDE, which actually crashes the Win2k installer. Any ideas here? I've not yet tried to use regular (parallel) IDE drives.

I haven't gotten around to trying to install Linux or BSD on the thing yet, as if Windows doesn't work, I figure any other OS has basically no chance of working.