Anyone else's computer as finicky as mine?

[AsianriceX]

--Summary at the bottom--

Ok, so I normally run 3x80GB HD's, 1 DVD-ROM drive and 2x30GB HD's in Raid 0 on my computer. The female parental unit wanted me to burn some cd's for her, so I attempted to swap out the DVD drive for an old burner that I never use. Whenever I touch anything inside the computer, something bad happens. All of a sudden, the computer either refuses to boot up past detecting IDE devices, detecting my RAID array, or it will even tease me by booting into XP and then restarting itself.(I have disabled auto-restart for STOP Errors so I have no idea what's going on).

So in a calm and collected manner, I rip out my computer from my desk and bring it to another table. I begin dissecting it, looking for anything that may have gone awry, but to no avail. I end up cleaning the bastard and putting everything back together. I think I'm in the clear.

I hook everything back up the way it was before this awful mess started, and it teases me again by booting into XP and restarting itself. Now I'm just heartbroken. This stupid computer still hates me even after I cleaned all the dust out of it.

On the plus side, if I remove every device except my primary harddrive, the computer boots and lets me post this message for everyone to see. How great is that?

This damn thing has acted like this before, but it usually fixes itself. Damn newfangled computers. :|

Summary:
-Mom wants son to burn cd's for her
-Son's computer has 3 HD's, 1 dvd drive, and 2 HD's in RAID 0
-Son complies by swapping dvd drive for old burner
-Computer believes it has been fondled by son
-Computer rebels by refusing to boot properly or by restarting itself after logging onto XP
-Son tries to fix computer
-Computer still feels violated and will only boot if only the primary harddrive is connected
-Son posts on ATOT while waiting for computer to reboot itself

 

[BlueWeasel]

Add another HD...that should fix everything

 

[AsianriceX]

Originally posted by: BlueWeasel
Add another HD...that should fix everything

You lie! Besides, I've maxed out the capacity in my Antec case unless I go for the 5.25"->3.5" brackets.

 

[Wuffsunie]

I have a friend with a computer like yours, only his tends to be full of software related problems. OSes don't like him, he couldn't get Starcraft to play for years (despite other games working), getting a stable install of an OS usually took a few tries. Lots of stuff like that. He has a similar multi-hard drive setup like yours, and had been slowly rebuilding his machine for a couple years. Recently, after a large batch of new hardware, it seems to have settled itself.

That was the most tempermental and finicky machine I have ever seen besides yours.

-- Jack

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
-- Bill Bryson

 

[AsianriceX]

Originally posted by: Wuffsunie
I have a friend with a computer like yours, only his tends to be full of software related problems. OSes don't like him, he couldn't get Starcraft to play for years (despite other games working), getting a stable install of an OS usually took a few tries. Lots of stuff like that. He has a similar multi-hard drive setup like yours, and had been slowly rebuilding his machine for a couple years. Recently, after a large batch of new hardware, it seems to have settled itself.

That was the most tempermental and finicky machine I have ever seen besides yours.

-- Jack

For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match.
-- Bill Bryson

Yeah, this is getting ridiculous. I swear, if this thing ever gets stable again, I'll never touch any component again until I'm ready to upgrade the whole thing. I've never had so much trouble when swapping out a simple optical drive.

 

[Martin]

Nope, mines pretty solid. I've had it for over 3 years now and the only things that happened were a memory failure (ahd to switch the ram) and HD went bad. Both were still under warranty.

Its a fine machine, even if it can't handle the newer games.

 

[AsianriceX]

Originally posted by: MartyTheManiak
Nope, mines pretty solid. I've had it for over 3 years now and the only things that happened were a memory failure (ahd to switch the ram) and HD went bad. Both were still under warranty.

Its a fine machine, even if it can't handle the newer games.

Oh yeah, speaking of memory... I discovered a month ago while trying to upgrade to 1GB that somewhere along the line, either a resistor or capacitor had broken off of one of my Crucial sticks. Don't get me wrong, the computer is still stable enough for me to not notice. Let's not speak more about this subject.

 

[AsianriceX]

Ah well, it's been about 30 minutes since I've booted up. I believe it's time to start hooking things back up again, one by one.

::crosses fingers::

 

[Siddhartha]

Sounds like you are going have to do are at least a reinstallation of XP or you might have to do a format of your C drive and a flesh installation

 

[cucumber]

Was your cd burner hooked up to the primary IDE channel or the secondary? I've had that kind of stuff happen when I had either
a fualty cd or hard drive sharing the primary channel with the main OS drive. It seems like you'll get problems when
the cd drive is starting to fail but hasn't failed completly yet. When it's starting to go bad, whatever it shares an ide channel with
acts strange and produces strange glitches.

 

[AsianriceX]

If there's one thing I've learned from this harrowing 4 hour experience, it's that computers are devilspawn.

I rechecked every wire and made sure they were nice and tight and right where they were before I even opened the case...or so I thought. It seems that I had tucked the cpu fan wires behind the mainboard as an afterthought as I was moving stuff around. I thought it was a good idea, since it got the wires out of the way and I remember reading articles where people would route ide cables behind the mainboard. I thought there would be no harm. So, I moved the wires back in front of the mainboard, and everything works now. I hate computers, and goodnight.

 

[Ryan]

My computer is stable as a rock now, but in the beginning I had tonnes of problems.