My comp shut down the other day while rendering a video with an error code that when I looked it up said that the kernal could not retrieve a file from the page file and had shut down to prevent damage to the system. When I booted it back up, the Bios would not detect either the master or slave HD on the primary IDE (DVD-Roms on secondary were detected). I did run diagnostics on the boot drive and it checked out ok. It took about 5 tries to get it to boot up.

Thereafter, the system was very slow booting up and would hang when trying to render a video. I formatted and reinstalled windows and at first everything seemed alright, then it shut down again with the same results while rendering a video. Now, sometimes (not always) when booting, it doesn't detect the HDs on the primary IDE and continues to boot and run slow.

Could this be a sign of a motherboard failure?

Specs:
Asus P4S8X
Pentium 4 2.4ghz
512mb PC2700 RAM
Western Digital 80gig HD (primary master)
Maxtor 160gig (primary slave)
ATI Radeon 9800Pro graphics card

Thanks in advance.

Yep, that's a good possibility. Check for Bad Capacitors (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25482&highlight=bad+capacitors), also check RAM and video card. I would try swapping the IDE cable too.

Ok. I'll swap that cable and check the others. Just for my information, how could the Ram or video card cause it not to detect the HDs?

how could the Ram or video card cause it not to detect the HDs?

Probably won't affect detecting the hard drive all that much, but could have a lot to do with booting really slow and hanging while doing video editing or at any other time, for that matter...And if you want to rule out as much as possible before deciding it's motherboard, you need to check those components. Trouble detecting hard drive though, is more likely to be motherboard or IDE controller related, since you say you've already tested the hard drives.

If you don't find anything physically wrong with the hardware, then start looking at software problems. Video editing program might not like your system or part of it, drivers could be causing trouble, program could be hogging too much RAM or not playing nice with shared files, wrong DirectX version, corrupted swap file...

And for video editing 512 RAM is probably a bit on the low side. That's one of the most demanding jobs you can expect of a computer, and everything else should handle it pretty well. If it were me, I'd go for 1024MB RAM for that kind of work. Possibly more...

Ok. I see your point. However, I don't think that it is a software problem as everything was working fine before the computer shutdown. No hangs or anything like that. But I will check everything that you have suggested, including the software. I'll post back if I find anything out. Thank you very much for you replies.