I was over at my buddy's place installing a second HDD on his old comp.
I put the HDD in and the OS didn't detect it. So I dl'ed some drivers for it and at the same time I dl'ed the chipset drivers (Intel 810 (yeah, really old)).
I installed the chipset drivers, it asked for a re-boot and then the thing didn't detect any HDD at all.

I scratched my head and figured I ruined his comp.
I spoke to a guy I used to by parts from today, and he told me that the drivers are OS/software based and that the BIOS not detecting any HDD is either firmware based or hardware based. So that means I didn't break it. He says it's probably a coincidence that it died while I was installing software drivers.
I sucessfully flashed his BIOS with the newest version but that didn't help. Then I put the old BIOS back on. Still nothing.

Anyway, I still feel bad 'cause my buddy doesn't understand anything I've told him. And even though he was planning on buying a new comp in February or so, I think he may be a bit put off by it. He says he isn't and that it's alright but...

Anyone else have a situation like this before?

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To artificial life, all reality is virtual.

[This message has been edited by Darth Evad (edited December 05, 2003).]

I once destroyed a case and formatted a hard drive to try and solve someone's problem, then blamed it on the CD drive (which I think was the problem since it had about 5 pins missing) and they couldn't afford to get a new case and CD drive so they let me have the computer. I then proceeded to not use it and eventually throw it away. Not really guilty, but still not the right thing to do!

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tristan is the best friend of the jedi

"I am the signature virus! Copy me into your signature so that I can take over the world! Moohahahee!"

And the moral of the story is: Never help anyone.

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WARNING: THIS POST MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF PEANUT!!!

But, the thing is, if he had taken it in to a 'professional' and paid $70 to have it installed, the same thing probably would have happened and he'd be out $70.

:/


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To artificial life, all reality is virtual.

I guess you'll have to be extra nice to him from now on if you think he's a little put off. Who knows, maybe you'll be better friends after it's all over!

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Check out updates for my editing work at the Shadow Jedi Academy.

evad, i think it'd be great if you happened to forget to move the mater/slave switch

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" You killed me. That wasn't very nice."
Noble Gases

Some chipset drivers do update BIOS from windows. So something could have happened there. But if you flashed bios without problems, that probably isn't it. I would check the master/slave jumper settings on both drives, like suggested before, and also check the IDE cables. Make sure they are plugged into the correct IDE cable slot on the mobo. (A hard drive MUST be on IDE 0 (the first one) and marked Primary to boot from any hard drive). Also check the power connectors, they can come loose sometimes. Especially the cheap ones that have been unplugged and plugged back in already.

If all else fails, put the system back to its original configuration, no new HDD, or anything. Then go to BIOS, and have it try to auto-detect. If those don't work, I'm out of ideas.

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"The future is not determined by a throw of the dice, but is determined by the conscious decisions of you and me."
I am addicted to ellipses!!! AHHH!!! ...

sometimes it's been VERY hard for me to work on my friends' computers because of that kinda stuff...
it's a good challenge for me to put technical stuff into layman's terms
a test of my language skills, heh.

i've done stuff like that too often to list them all (=

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"Those who are able to work, and refuse the opportunity, should not expect society's support."

****. ****. ****.
It was the IDE cable. It was 'loose'. I pressed it down and rebooted the comp and now it works.
****.
LOL!! Too much.
Thanks Matty.

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To artificial life, all reality is virtual.

[This message has been edited by Darth Evad (edited December 05, 2003).]

Ah yes, everyone knows rule 1 oof what to do when there's a computer problem. Check for loose cables (really! no lie!).

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The Mega-ZZTer's Gaming Haven!

[This message has been edited by Gebohq (edited December 28, 2003).]

No, no, no!
Everyone knows that its not checking loose cables but making sure everything is pushed in as far in as possible.... Why did that just sound dirty....

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"So there I was completely naked and covered in tartar sauce..."

A few years ago, I was called out to a house to look at a couple of computers, and give an opinion. So, I arrived, and took a look. There were 2 systems, a 386 and a 486. (this was quie a few years ago, actully)

Well, I plugged up the 486, and rigged up a monitor and keyboard, and turned it on. It booted. It had DOS5 Win3.1, but nothing else. So, I shut it off and rigged up the 386. It booted. It also had DOS5, but no Windows. So, I shut it down, cracked the cases, and looked inside.

Basicaly, the woman wanted me to consolodate the systems together and make one ubersystem. I said fine, and tried to boot the 486 again to check the system specs again.
It wouldnt boot.
Infact, it never made it to past the POST.

I tried the 386.
It did the same thing.

Now, these boxes had booted just 5 minutes before, 5 bloody minutes. I didnt touch any of the internal components, so I was sure I didnt fry anything. I was stumped.

So, I took the boxes back home with me. I had to do something. I mean, they were working before I got ahold of them...

When I got them back home, and I started tearing into them, it finally hit my why they had stopped working.
The batteries had exploded.

Yeah, the little CMOS batteries that hold the mobo config data and keep the clock going... they had split open and sprayed battery acid all over the motherboards. On both systems.
Seems the systems had been sitting in a closet for a few years. In some bizzarre set of circumstances, me plugging them in and turning them on caused the batteries to blow up.

I still dont know why.

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Fight the future.

Yikes. Were you able to explain that to her?

"Check the cables? Of course they's plugged in. They were a minute ago. What are you tal...
Oh... Heh...
There. Fixed."

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To artificial life, all reality is virtual.

Went to visit friends (about 3 hours away in Atlanta) for the weekend a while back. First night there, we're talking, and he says they've had some trouble with their computer, it's running slow, etc.

So, first thing I ask is how long it's been since they've defragged. That's a good easy starting place if the computer's running slow, I figure.

So I defrag the computer. And then I reboot the computer. And then Windows crashes on startup. Oops.

All told I think we stayed up until about 3 or 4 that night trying to figure it out. I gave up, and I kept apologizing because I thought I had broken it. But it still bugs me, because defragging a hard drive shouldn't do that. He kept saying it was an old computer anyway and they were going to get a new one soon.

When I get back home, I do a search for the error message. Turns out it wasn't something I did; one of their McAfee programs tends to corrupt certain important Windows files. I emailed him the new copies and he got it fixed pretty easily.

Yes and no. In about the same way that you can explain headlights to a deer, I suppose.

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Fight the future.

I've only ever had one instance where I had a friend's PC I was fixing annoy me so much. Every other one has always been pretty cooperative, oddly enough. It's my own that likes frustrating me though(Well, she's been a pretty good girl the past few years though.)

So a couple of months ago my friend brings his sister's PC over to my house and tells me he thinks the PS just went out. He wanted me to look over it just in case though, in case it was something else. So, I pop the case, unplug it from the motherboard, and proceed to test the PS alone to make sure. Ok, doesn't start, so I'm assuming that it's obviously gone out. No big deal, I've got a spare 350W sitting around that I'll let him have. Well, while I'm unscrewing the seemingly defunct one, I notice something... Apparently the whole time, the damn switch was off, and neither of us had realized it. So of course it's working perfectly fine after all.

Then he said it also had some bad crashing issues, and I might as well take a look at that. Ok, boot it up and what do I see? Ahh yes, it's our little friend, Windows ME... Of course I had ask him why. He apparently felt the same way, and since it wasn't his PC, I forgave him for that crime against humanity, heh. So, anyway, this thing's taking 10+ minutes to boot. Then after it's finally booted, I'm looking around through it and it's taking another 10+ minutes just to load the drive list. So, I assume it's probably a corrupted installation, and since he also wanted me to put a new hard drive in it for him, I just decided it'd be better for everyone to just pop Win2k on there.

Ok, so I put the new hard drive in, pop the Win2k CD in and make sure the CD-ROM drive is in the boot order ahead of the hard drive. Ok, it is. So, booting... Hmm... Not detecting bootable CD for some reason... Going very, very slow once again... So then he conveniently remembers to tell me that the drive was broken... Turns out that was the source of all of the crashing too. The drive was able to detect a disk in it, but it could not retrieve any information from the disk, so it just kept trying and after like 10 minutes, the system just eventually gave up. So when it was booting slowly earlier, it's because there was a disk in there and it just kept on trying and trying to read it. Also obviously what was causing the drives list to be so slow, since it kept trying to retrieve the information about the disk and it couldn't.

So I just decided the best thing to do given a defunt CD-ROM drive was to just do a drive copy. So I did that and everything worked fine as long as no CD was put in the drive. I was of course ready to hurt him after I'd wasted so much time, and he'd forgotten the drive was busted.