Alright then I guess all of this was for nothing then.
That's a little short trough the corner.
You could try to fix your io card. often the problems are oxidated finger contacts. Rubbing the gold plated contacts with a pencil eraser sometimes helps. (Do it with the riser card as well.) Contact 60 spray might help. Inserting and removing the boards a couple of times could help as well.
Using the system with a harddisk or compact flash disk works much better and faster than using it with a cdrom.
It's definitly not a waste of time to do that conversion.
That harddisk message is fixable.
On some other posts, you might read someone managed to patch the exe so that the security dongle is no longer needed, but,
if your io board isn't working well, you will have sound problems and problems with the test and calibrate button. It won't save it's high scores and lose it's settings due to the nvram not being read correctly...
Pretty much any functionallity of the io board can become a problem.