Friday, March 31, 2006
That Murphy Is One Sick Bastard
I pulled out the reticent computer from this post and got around to troubleshooting it further. It has absolutely nothing to do with video, thankyouverymuch, and that means my gut was right, and I was foolish to 1) listen to the assurance that it was just refresh rate and 2) not get around to solving it until after driving to Wilmington for more parts. That is, I will now have to go back there an extra time.
It’s the hard drive.
I tried playing with monitor-level and BIOS settings. I tried booting to the XP CD, which got as far as launching setup and starting to check hardware when it did exactly the same thing.
Finally I booted CD with the serial ATA (SATA) cable to the hard drive unplugged. No problem; XP setup was all ready to install, recover, or quit at my option.
I then tried the drive plugged into each of the four SATA connectors on the motherboard, and tried a different SATA cable. No dice.
Oh well. Driving through the tunnel is cool. At least northbound. Why is it that the southbound tunnel already looks like it’s been there 20 years and feels like a dangerously mad rush? And the bridge is cool. Maybe Sadie can go with me that day.
I just wish I had a spare drive. Then I could set it up regardless and just return the bad drive for replacement. As I told my sales guy and the RMA person in e-mail minutes ago, about the only other confirmatory thing I could do is take the matching drive out of the system I haven’t unboxed yet. That’s probably pushing it too far.
Anyway, I need to help the nephew with his computer rebuild, which is being round peg meets square hole balky. Apparently it’s not going to be an early night.