Hi Dan,
Actually I'll be back from Antarctica at the end of October. Right after I've finished freezing my arse off; fixing wind turbines in the screaming wind at -20C today wasn't overly pleasant.
But yeah, that A4000T IDE port doesn't sound happy. Usually quite repairable of course. If SACC-guy has someone that can do SMD rework, then replace U660 (tri-state bi-directional buffer) and U670 (D-type flip-flop) as a starting point. At least the IDE interface is extremely simple, so there's usually not too much that goes wrong with it.
