ill server, the saga continues

So I've taken the drives out of Gonzo and put them into the box that doesn't recognise drives that big, but you can configure it for no drives and Linux will do the rest, and, well, at least all my data's intact. I've backed up the system disk to a convenient laptop (!) and started trying to eliminate possible faults with Gonzo's motherboard. At this point I'm strongly beginning to suspect that it's a terminal motherboard issue, such as a spontaneously dead IDE chipset.