I thought I was cool. I plugged in the Archos and XP read it as an external drive. Yeehaw. I went to transfer the existing music from the Archos onto my secondary hard drive. Oops… where did my secondary hard drive go?
I unplugged the Archos and restarted my computer. Still no ‘D’ drive (that’s my 30gb MP3 drive). I immediately started taking my computer apart. Once things were cleared out, I realized that the EIDE ribbon from the motherboard to the D drive had been disconnected. I’m thinking that happened when I installed the 128mb of RAM.
Well, since I had gutted my computer, it didn’t work when I tried to reboot. “Primary Hard Disk Error” That’s all I get now. I sat there, on the floor for two hours, trying to put humpty dumpty back together again. I’m sure Elise will have to go to church on my behalf next Sunday due to the profanities that were yelled by yours truly.
I took out the USB 2.0 card, the 128mb of RAM and my 30gb hard drive. Still no luck. My instincts were to call in the big guns – my Mom. I tinkered around with my computer for a while, I tried every combination of jumper settings on the hard drives, ribbon and power source seatings. I e-mailed Mom this morning – she suggested that I do what I’ve already done. The one thing I haven’t really looked deeply into is the BIOS settings.
I’m saving my larynx today so I can have air with which to cuss tonight. I’m really hoping my hard drive(s) aren’t fried.
The moral of the story: I really don’t know. I guess it would be: “If the lamp doesn’t turn on, check to see if it’s plugged in before you take the whole damn thing apart.”