Finally gave in at the end of last week and decided to sort out an intermittent problem we had been having with our computer for the last couple of years. At random intervals from a couple of days to several months our PC would crash, unfortunately when you went to reboot it wouldn’t. I never quite worked out what it had actually done but it was well knackered and as our data is held on a seperate drive we just reinstall everything and are back up in a couple of hours.
Unfortunately it had decided to do this a couple of times in about a three week period so it was getting beyond a joke. So at the end of last week we decided to replace the motherboard with an integrated one and also buy a bigger drive to use for data storage. Should be a nice simple upgrade. Remove contents of current case, replace with new motherboard, add in new drive, enjoy. These things are never simple though
Would the system see the new hard drive (I should add at this point add that it is a new SATA drive), would it ‘eck. Changing settings, changing connectors and cables made no difference. After two days of driving back and forth to get replacement parts (on the assumption that either the motherboard or drive was broken) we finally worked out what the problem was.
The hard drive we had bought did not work with the motherboard we had bought, even though they should have been compatible! There is no reason why the two components should bot work together. I was quite glad it turned out as it did as I was beginning to believe that I was doing something REALLY stupid.
If you are using an ASUS P4P800-VM do not buy a Maxtor 160GB +10 SATA drive. from my experience they will not work together. Scan computers in Bolton were brilliant and between us we worked out where the problem lay.