Error Loading Operating System

Ok, this one has turned into a bear for me.  Here's what happened.

I had a computer about two years old that started acting up.  Wouldn't boot up and such.  Anyways, I bought a brand new motherboard for it as I needed to upgrade it anyway.  The board was a ECS nForce3-A nForce3 Socket 754 ATX Motherboard, Ram it can take is DDR 200/266/333/400MHz Memory.  I moved over the ram from the old motherboard which is PC2700(333 mhz) ram.  It recognizes the memory fine in CMOS and on boot up when it does the memory test it is the right amount.  Both sticks are 512 mb so 1 gig of ram.  No onboard display but I have a agp Radeon 9250 plugged in the agp slot.  Now the tough part.

I took the old motherboard out of the tower and installed the new motherboard.  Plugged in the processor, hooked up the fan, etc.  Kept the same hard drive as master and the secondary as slave.  Hooked it all up to the motherboard, checked my jumpers.  Turned the power on and looks like it's going to boot up.  Tested memory and passed it with the correct amount.  Detected IDE drives fine.  Verifing DMI Pool......... drops down a line and I get Error Loading Operating System.  I do a little troubleshooting, make sure everything is plugged in correctly, etc.  Reboot, same thing.  Format the hard drive and reinstall windows 2k pro.  Reboot, same thing.  Did some research and changed the CMOS settings on the hard drives access mode to "large".  Rebooted, same thing.  Ran recovery console and fixmbr/fixboot.  Rebooted, get disk read error this time.  Changed out the IDE cable with a different one and took off the second hard drive.  Rebooted into Win 2k setup.  Deleted all partitions on the master drive and formated complete drive, rebooted and reinstalled 2k.  When I rebooted this time it hung on the detecting IDE drives on boot up.  Restarted and detected them fine but got the error loading operating system error again.  Took that HD off, set jumpers on secondary HD to master and hooked it up to master slot, leaving old master HD off system completely.  Rebooted to win 2k setup, formated, installed, rebooted.  Same error.

Keep in mind that in CMOS the hard disk displays the correct capacity and all, I tried Large access mode and LBA access mode to no avail.

I'm at my wits end here and I don't know what step to take next.  I would try flashing the bios as the version of the bios that I am on is F and the lastest that ECS has is G.  Only problem is that I don't have a floppy drive on this comp and I don't know how to do it with a CD.