The IDE header has been visually accounted for, I moved the cable from the middle to the end and I don't have enough money to go out and buy a new drive now. So I'm sorry, but I'm trying to find every possibility to get this drive to work.

It is my understanding of computers that if the cable is not working correctly that the drive would either not work at all or the error wouldn't be the same if it was intermitten since it wouldn't make sense for the cable to fail only when reading from a certian part of the drive.

I would have no problem fixing this in DOS, but unfortunately I am not familiar with Linux other then what I have played around with on the Empeg. In DOS I would scandisk and find and mark bad sectors or at least be able to repartition and reformat the drive.

I have used the builder image and it doesn't seem to be working as my custom start screen shows up everytime I boot. I was under the impression that this would reformat the drive. I have went to the shell and under fdisk removed all the partitions I could find and wrote to the drive before exiting. I boot back up to once again see my custom startup screen followed by a drive not found error. Running the build after this gets the unit to boot up normally and once again, same errors as first reported. A failed sync with jEmplode tells me that I've not freed up any drive space either. Please feel free to tell me where my logic is flawed.