So the new PC plans were this: take the DVD-RW out of the old machine. Take the ATI Radeon 9700 All in Wonder of it. Put both in new machine. Put new ATI Radeon 9700 Pro in new PC. Put old DVD drive in old machine. Put new network card in old PC.
What the heck did I do wrong?
I don’t know. Seriously. I used to have problems with the old DVD drive. Sometimes it wouldn’t work correctly on the system. That was always a matter of rebooting and it’d be fine. This time, though, my computer would come up and say that my secondary master and slave combo were ATAPI incompatible then wouldn’t load them. It was random, almost totally random at first. Then it got progressively worse over the past day or so.
I took the DVD out of this one. It still did it. I took out both drives out to see if that was it. That time it came up and said that my primary drive was ATAPI incompatible. A reboot and changing the drive status in BIOS fixed that. I tried unplugging the drives and plugging them back in; that didn’t do it. I tried changing the cables, that didn’t do it. Sure the primary disk is working now, but again, it’s the secondary — my CD drive and my dvd drive — that still won’t work.
A while back it had a problem with the primary hard drive. I thought it was the hard drive going bad, but I think that it’s the motherboard and I think that stuff is going fast on that this thing. So I ordered a new motherboard and new RAM (my current one uses SDRAM so I can’t transfer it), but I can move my XP 1800+ over to the new motherboard. Well, hopefully anyway. The new motherboard has a built in LAN and 4 USB 4.0 ports on it, so hopefully that’ll take out the need for two PCI slots. Hopefully that’ll take the power load down.
So the new plan:
Reformat the new computer since I put windows on the wrong partition. Move as much as possible over to that machine.
When I build the old one with the new motherboard, I’m going to reverse the drives since my d: drive is faster than my c: drive right now (and bigger too). I think I’ll partition it into 2 c: drives of 40 gigs each. Or one of 20 and one of 60. I just want Windows alone with the swapfile. Then when I do windows, I’m only going to do it with my agp card and my sound card. Everything else I’ll put in one step at a time until it all works. Cross your fingers. I mean seriously. I’ll probably mess this up.
The good news is that the mini-TV-computer works great. The ATI All in Wonder 9700 Pro’s remote control is kick ass. You can use it as a wireless mouse. That so rocks. 🙂
But otherwise … ugg.
More later.
k9