Computer upgrade woes!

[volklgirl]

A little background before I start the saga:

For ages, I've been running an old Pentium II 400Mhz machine until I decided to start uploading and editing video. For Christmas 2 years ago, I asked my Dad (who has an entire computer animation and video editing/copying suite in his basement - at last count 6 networked computers ) for a machine I could do video editing on. He threw a bunch of parts together to build a servicable machine for me. I was thrilled to actually be able to upload video and play DVDs finally!!

Until I decided to do my first upgrade :(. While putting in a DVD burner, the computer decided to no longer recognize my SCSI video drive or my DVD-ROM drive. Arg! A couple of days later, it somehow fixed itself and everything has been fine since. It has turned into my personal machine and I just love it!

Then, I started running out of room on my miniscule 6Gig hard drive (keep in mind that this was supposed to be an editing machine - the hard drive was only supposed to be big enough to run the editing program and keep the temp files during editing while the SCSI drive was to be used for file storage). Double Argh!

Hubby got tired of listening to me whining about having to delete stuff all the time, and that annoying "Out of disk space" message I kept getting, so he bought me a 320Gig drive for Christmas last year.

Memories of frustration and irritation from the last upgrade flashed in my brain, so the drive has been sitting on a shelf for almost 8 months now. Until last Friday.

After battling a migraine all day, I just chilled out until about 8pm. I saw the box sitting on the shelf and thought, "why not do that tonight?". BAD idea!!! At 4:00am, I was sitting on the floor in front of the stupid computer in tears. :Cry: Couldn't get it to boot up into windows or even read the DVD drive containing the Windows XP boot disk. I realy thought I was going to have to take it to a pro.

Then, on Saturday, I had an epiphany! Try going to the Windows web site and see if I can download XP setup onto floppy disks, since that was the only thing the computer was recognizing at that point. Yup, there it is! 6 disks needed, check. Yay!! Download and save to disk on my network server, boot up the personal machine from the floppies, reistall Windows XP, reboot, and wait.

Yay!! There's my desktop again! Run some utilities to repair and reconfigure the registry, reboot, and everything seems to be fine. Except, no DVD drives again. Drats! This is getting old. So, I disconnect the new hard drive, recable the primary IDE port so I at least have the original hard drive and the DVD-ROM, then I take a couple of days off.

Now it's 11:05 Tuesday night. I'm again sitting on the floor typing this on the network server while joyfully listening to my computer whir and hum and click behind my back as the Data Lifeguard Tools program is fomatting my new drive and copying all my files off the old drive onto the new drive !!!

I have no idea how I got everything to finally work. . I just recabled everything inside again, double checked all the internal power plugs, and reset the Master/Slave jumpers on each drive. It hung during power up a couple of times until I downloaded the updated BIOS files then went into the BIOS setup and reset the Primary IDE Slave to Auto. Boom! she boots right up, Data Lifegard recognizes that the new drive is bigger than 136Gig and asks if I want to fix that and reboot. I say OK, and now here we are.

Is it just me that always ends up getting in way deeper than expected, or is this the norm???

Oops, gotta go......just got the "Copy Complete" message on it!!!! Woot!

 

[pinto]

Is it just me that always ends up getting in way deeper than expected, or is this the norm???

It's the norm as far as I'm concerned. You start doing something simple, and 4 days later, you stumble away, bleary-eyed and scraggly-haired ... and only half-finished (or in worse shape than you started). Puts me in a bad mood just thinking about it.

 

[LilaBear]

Everything I read from Volklgirl makes my eyes swivel in my head and kickstarts my inferiority complex. She is technically superb in every sport. She's a geek right! But she also has natural athleticism.

Except that when I met her, after she put down the tools in her hand, she is just a fabulous woman, competent at what she does, but a great conversationalist with understanding, compassion and unending support.

I stand in awe. In the meantime, the above scenario for me would have been ... "so I'm on the 3rd phone call to Apple support with an Appletini in my hand, poking aimlessly ........"

 

[SnowHot]

Does this mean you'll be in a good mood on the ride tomorrow?

 

[MaineSkiLady]

Wow, are you ever persistent!!! Glad you got things running. Ah, yes, computers.....can't live with 'em, and....well, we all know the rest...

 

[Jilly]

Geez, now I don't know if I want to try to add the new personal data storage drive I got! I was saving it for a rainy day to add to the system. You available by phone for tech support???

 

[toughgirl]

I can't help but laugh at your story. My hubby does computers for a living and KNOWS what he's doing... and that stuff Still happens to him too

 

[MaineSkiLady]

Geez, now I don't know if I want to try to add the new personal data storage drive I got! I was saving it for a rainy day to add to the system. You available by phone for tech support???

Jilly, what brand is it? I had great luck with Western Digital My Book (comes in sizes up to 1TB now , I have 500GB). It's about trade paperback size, so not altogether portable, but WD's do really well, and then you can get stuff off your hard drive and free up space (really critical for videos/video creation, as I've learned). What will slow down is scanning. I have my virus scan set to scan the whole show daily, and it takes about an additional 10 minutes to run through the external.

One good aspect is that the files never seem to get fragmented on that drive, no matter how much I move them around. The thing is awesome.

This was such a seamless install that DS got one (and filled it in 6 months, good grief). No problem for him, either. Highly recommend Western Digital.

 

[Jilly]

The one I got is HP. Sale at Staphles last week. Its for storing pictures mostly. And I have to empty the laptop before I travel to the US of A, or they can keep my laptop till whenever. So the suggestion is to move any files you want to keep to a storage drive. Also it'll free up space on the laptop that I might need. I don't think it should be a big thing. USB etc. I've already got prints of all pictures, back up CD's and now this thing.

 

[volklgirl]

Does this mean you'll be in a good mood on the ride tomorrow?

Ummmmm. No. My Woot! was premature apparently.

I disconnected both hard drives, reset the jumpers to Master on the new drive and reinstalled. The flash screen comes up, the Bios setup screen comes up, then..........."hard disk boot error". ACK!!!!!

Still no DVD drive either, so I'm back to booting up off the floppies. I reboot with the floppies and get to the "Repair or Install" screen. I choose "Install" and wait. The next message I get is "Can't find CD drive" and it shuts down again. WTF????

The one saving grace in all this is that I could keep my original hard drive as the boot drive and just run the 320G as a storage drive, but that's not really what I was hoping for. I'd have to buy a new dual IDE cable for hubby's CD-ROm and CD-RW drives since I stole his temporarily while I did this, but I guess that's a small price for a teeny bit of peace-of-mind. Of course, I STILL have to find up what's up with my secondary IDE so I can get my DVD drives back, too. BLEH!

 

[volklgirl]

I give up!!!

So, for the last 2 weeks, I've been using my computer with the 6Gig drive as my boot drive and the 320Gig drive as a secondary hard drive. My SCSI drive has also been working, but no DVD-ROM or DVD-RW drives. Since all I've really been doing is getting on the internet, that's been fine.

Last night I decided to see if I can get the computer to recognize the DVD drives. BIG mistake !! I shut the computer down, unplugged the IDE and power cables from all the internal components then replugged everything back in. Plugged the computer back in and hit the switch...............

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. No lights, no fans, no noise, nothing.

I look inside and see that the power connector to the front power switch had come undone, so I plugged that back in. Hit the switch again. Still nothing.

Then I unplug everything attached to the power supply and remove the screws anchoring it to the frame. I pull it out and connect it directly to the wall plug. Still nothing. Argh. Hubby finds the power supply's internal fuse, tears it apart and replaces the fuse. We plug it in and hold our breaths.

Nope.

I put the power supply back in, hand him the PC, the cover, the face plate, the cables, and all the screws and say "I'm DONE." As far as I'm concerned the next step for this POS will be to tie a rope around it, bury it in the sand in the lake and and use it to anchor my Hobie Cat. He gingerly removes it from my sight and says he'll take it in.

I connected my big monitor to our network server and will be living with that until either A) my POS is fixed or B) I get a new PC or laptop. :p

 

[MaineSkiLady]

VG, I presume is this a desktop cpu? Why not open it up and see if there are sufficient expansion slots? If so, the computer can be somewhat easily upgraded by changing out the motherboard, etc. What is your current operating system?

I changed out my cpu 3+ years ago when my primary 8GB hard drive failed. It's a whole new tower, with the plus being a lot of expansion slots. The entire contents of your current C drive can go on the external for the change-out.

Most hard drives now are 200+GB. Just running certain programs or internet applications require 50GB of free hard drive space! And that's with the program already installed!

The non-recognition of the DVD drives is probably partially due to insufficient hard drive space. I've kinda been there/done that and remember it none too fondly.

Good luck. I was happy camper when I made the change -- it was long overdue.

 

[pinto]

As far as I'm concerned the next step for this POS will be to tie a rope around it, bury it in the sand in the lake and and use it to anchor my Hobie Cat.

[I muted it on purpose, by the way. NSFW lyrics. But the music is great ... just be aware.]

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwjU3HWLM3c&feature=related"] try this [/ame]

 

[volklgirl]

VG, I presume is this a desktop cpu? Why not open it up and see if there are sufficient expansion slots? If so, the computer can be somewhat easily upgraded by changing out the motherboard, etc. What is your current operating system?

Yup, looks like a new motherboard is probably in order. I'm currently running XP Pro, but only have 512 RAM with an 800MHz processor. Plenty to run the Adobe Pro editing software, but otherwise, pretty lame by today's standards. I've already added both DVD drives, new video and audio cards, new USB expansion ports, Firewire ports, and the network card and each time it's been a nightmare (some way worse than others).

The entire contents of your current C drive can go on the external for the change-out.

The new drive is not an external. The whole point to this latest adventure was to replace the 6Gig with the 320G, but I never got it to boot up correctly. :mad:

The non-recognition of the DVD drives is probably partially due to insufficient hard drive space. I've kinda been there/done that and remember it none too fondly.

Nope. They were both working before I tried to replace the 6G drive. Now, the BIOS won't even recognize that there's anything connected to the secondary IDE. I'm pretty sure it's either an issue with XP or with the motherboard. Bleh!!

 

[volklgirl]

Latest update!

Finally some good new (sort of).

Hubby, the fine shopper that he is , found a Dell computer at a garage sale last weekend for $25 with everything but a mouse. He asked if it worked and the guy said yes, but it's really slow. "Maybe if you take some of the games of it, it will speed back up?". Hubby figured we could just steal the power supply out of it if nothing else. Instead, we got a blazing fast machine!

Turns out it had 16 trojans and 4 viruses helping to slow it down . 2 days of running virus scans and trojan removers then another day of running registy repairers over and over, and now she's clean as a whistle and so fast it makes my head spin! It came with a Pentium 4 2.66 Ghz processer, 80 Gig hard drive, CD ROM and RW, 6 USB 2.0 ports, a network port, and a firewire port, even! There's only 256 MB RAM on board right now, but it's capable of hosting up to 4 GB, and my brother-in-law has 2 Gig from his old Dell that he's sending up.

I added my new 320 Gig hard drive as a secondary and replaced both CD drives with my DVD drives. So far, the wireless adapter is working fine at 54 Bps, it's reading and using the secondary hard drive, it's recognizing both the DVD drives, and all my programs have loaded up without a hitch (except Adobe Premiere - I don't think there's enough RAM to load or run it).

Right now, I'm THIS happy:

 

[Jilly]

Deal!!

I've just given my Pentium 4 to my Dad. Love my laptop. Sounds like the same machine, except I always ran my scans!! It was $699 at the time. So really good deal!