210P issues..

Ok im a pretty new owner of a 210P.. Well since i bought it i had it with me @ school and added on a WD 3gb HD (had my ide 160gb Samsung in there also) the HD's were on CS. Now it decided not to detect in knoppix my IDE.. So i get home and that weekend i try a rounded IDE cable i had.. it works.. Now that i have my HD showing and that my DVD-RW (NEC ND-3500A) doesnt want to work. Could it be another bad cable? Which is fine since i have many IDE cables, then recently my Ethernet port wont work.. It shows a light and all that, but it wont recieve DHCP from my router or even my direct connection to the Cable modem.. This happened in both linux (2.6 kernel debian) and also in Windows XP home.

so my IDE cable was bad for my HD's it might be the same for my DVD.. <---- Easily Fixable

Now my ethernet port isnt working. How do i fix this..

Also thanks to the people who said how to stop the random USB reboots.. woot i was wondering about that...

i have my XP cd in while im in linux and when i do a copy all files recursive to my HD its done in like seconds (impossible) so somethings wrong.. and when my XP cd tries to install it says Setup is detecting Hardware, then shows a screen with a blinking _

Bad cable(s)? and also i have tried many ethernet cables, lights are on, nobody is home.. DHCP wont work and in XP it was working on and off... How can i fix the ethernet problem?