Remember to check your cables

[Ravsitar]

This is just a heads up for everyone.

Remeber to make sure that your IDE cables are plugged all the way in!

I spent 3 days last week trying to get my brother's computer up and stable and it was the stupid ide cable on the cd drive that was the problem.

I had planned to take the whole box apart at Christmas for some maintenance and upgrades. There was a fan dieing in it and the Powersupply was pretty weak. SO, I bought 2 new fans and an ANTEC 300W powersupply for it. I took the entire thing apart, vacuumed it out, replaced the heatsink with some AS3, put in some more ram, swapped out the powersupply, swapped in a new hard drive and put the new fans in. Booted up fine and installed w2k. Everything seemed to be ok till I installed some programs. Then nothing was stable. Checked the hard drive – fine. Checked the cpu temps - fine. Reseated the ram. Checked the IDE cables at the mobo connection – fine. Reformatted and install w2k again. Same problems. Finally though to check the ide cables on the cd drive. Damn thing was only on half the pins. Argh. I tried a few programs and found it was still unstable so I reformatted and reinstalled everything again. Now it’s fine.

So basically I thought I'd remind all of you to learn from my mistake and save yourselves some time.


Remeber to make sure that your IDE cables are plugged all the way in!

 

[MaxiKana]

Also don't forget the floppy cables! same thing happend to me but it was a floppy cable. :/

 

[CCW]

The thing with floppy cables is when people put them the wrong way round. Floppy cables have a twisted end, this goes into the floppy drive not the motherboard. Also, you do not orient the pin 1 of the ribbon towards the power on floppy drives, if the power is above the floppy connector.

Craig

 

[reverse]

Not only do they need to be plugged in, but they need to be good cables from the start! There is always that small instance where your cables could be bad... not likely if new but I've had some old ones give me headaches in the past.

 

[Ravsitar]

All good suggestions. From now on I'll be checking for the stupid mistakes before I install anything.