The agp problem is easily solved. Press control F1 with the bios setup menu and you will be presented with advanced bios setup features. An AGP memory size can then be set. In my case 128 MB. Called this an obscured feature of the nforce3 250 chipset bios setup, since it wasn't readily apparent in any documentation provided with the mainboard.
Have yet to work out the second ide problem since I disconnected the drive. -- Problems with AGP and DMA on second ide with nForce3 250 chip https://launchpad.net/bugs/64996 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs