And it STILL wouldn't boot? Wow. It might be a motherboard problem then, I had some issues myself once with storage devices, though resetting the BIOS and then flashing it did the trick

well here's an update of sorts.

so I found the issue. seems ver 1.19 bios is either corrupt or it didnt flash right cause the boot segment of the bios code was corrupt. my thoughts with it booting linux is linux just dont care about your bios much with booting. Windows (Microsoft) is a little more bios dependant. (I could be wrong) Long story short, its fixed.

I reset the bios to safe defaults as i did many of times before while troubleshooting. It boot right into windows xp mce 05 Setup. with the OS loaded, and the awardflash utility not functional in a clean boot mode for flashing, ran the abit utility for windows (this is where my problems started with but i hit the live update feature before though) and flashed to a previous version of the bios. I am now able to boot, and turn on the options for LAN, audio, usb, sata, etc. all seems to be good so far.

Thanks ABIT for taking my weekend away you bastards

well my MCE issues are back. i tried the MCE 05 reset tool. Didnt help. I cannot fast forward or rewind anything in MCE. I know there is a command line to reset and reinstall MCE ****. This is sort of annoying.

any ideas? remember my installation is basically virgin. just drivers, and a few apps and i did try a different codec.