Had a client with a notebook I recently setup for them bring it back in for repair. Before I saw them I diagnosed from their description of the state of the computer and answers from questions I had. I had ordered a replacement lcd backlight inverter for $3 shipped from eBay and had it waiting when they delivered the pc to me. Turns out they had an IDE disk controller malfunction. Researching the history of this kind of problem for this model resulted in numerous others with just as many being sold for parts or as-is on eBay. I knew that the controller is never a seperate replaceable part aside from replacing the entire motherboard which would cost roughly the same as a whole used working model. Who's to say a working motherboard bought for replacement will not fall ad yours had and as many others had 2 seconds after installing it? So I diagnosed that the notebook is as good as trash and he must move on. I promised to not give up entirely for that is not my nature. So I messed around and noticed the optical drive would work properly with no controller errors if I removed the internal hard drive. Then searching online for my similar results I stumbled upon a simple reply by a guy who said he fixed it by removing the cd-rim drive entirely.
Light bulb.
Disk controller only allows one device at a time.
Installed hdd, removed optical via a set screw under the memory access panel.
And it's working.
USB support is fully functional so I backed up the Os using an external DVD-RW drive. And all is good.
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