My P4 machine has developed some issues. It's been working perfectly for months in the same configuration and no changes have been made to it recently. It just decided not to work one day.

First, the system has been overclocked and stable for some months now. The Abit board is quite good for this. The FSB is clocked to 233MHz along with the DRAM. The other buses are at standard clock speeds (66/33) for stability. Temperatures are kept at around 50C for the chipset and around 62C for the processor under load.

Second, the drive throws a hal.dll is missing message on boot, which is a typical MBR problem. When attempting to use XP recovery console on boot from CD another error message is thrown as the setup begins loading modules. These errors occur when the system is running at standard clock speeds as well. The boot CD and the HDD both work in other systems without error. Other drives in the P4 system also produce errors.

So, I'm left with the possibility that the IDE controller is faulty, or perhaps that the BIOS is corrupted. Are there any other possibilities? At this point, I'm looking at purchasing a PCI SATA controller to test or work around the issue or replacing the motherboard or BIOS chip with another one.