[Monstermile]

Tried to get help on another bb with this problem but no luck. So here it goes:

I had a brand new KT4 Ultra mobo that after some serious diagnostics turned out to apparently have a bad IDE controller. Bad right out of the box. Well I had to RMA it to MSI because I missed the newegg RMA period by a few days. Got the replacement (a refurb instead of new) and now I am having issues again. I turned it on and got a boot failure with the Win98 boot disk. All I get is I/O Disk Error..Replace Disk and Press Any Key. I got the Western Digital diags to load from the floppy so I wouldn't think it would be a floppy drive issue. Also I notice that right at start-up it says something about no 80 pin connector detected and something else not detected. It goes by too fast to read. What I have done so far....

-CMOS reset
-Tried several floppy and IDE cables
-Ran WD diags twice with no errors. Once before and once after a low level format
-Memory was previously tested on the original mobo
-Plus everything else that was tried with the original mobo problem

Where do I go from here. I'm getting pretty fed up now. I've had all these parts for my new system since April, but still have no system up and running.


Specifics:
MSI KT4 Ultra
Athlon 1700+ tbred B
512MB Kingston HyperX PC2700
WD 80g SE
Excaliber 9000 PRO 128MB
Win98


Thanks in advance