I've been using my first home built machine for about a year now. Haven't had any major problems, and in fact fewer difficulties than with any machine before (maybe because it made me give up on the mostly useless tech support!)
So I've got a little cash laid by, and decide to do a little upgrade tweaking. I bought 2 more 1GB sticks of PC6400 DDR2-800 Crucial RAM (exact same product as already installed), and I got an IDE 160GB second hard drive to use for manual backups.
Neither has integrated into the system properly, and I have no idea why. Overall I'd consider myself a moderately competent amateur from a tech standpoint, but I've been baffled here.
Problem #1 - Although Setup boot panel sees 4GB, the system only sees 3GB when XP up and running. (Checked several ways, including control panel and My Computer/properties general panel.)
Problem #2 - Hard drive #2 generally is invisible. My Computer, and administrative tools/computer management/ disk management, simply don't see the drive except for a few inexplicable times.
Problem #3 - The DVD drive has disappeared from the system under some connection regimes, and although I can see why sometimes, other times I have no idea.
To keep things clean, I'm posting the system specs in a second post...so if it would help in understanding the narrative, check out the post below.
Not much to say about the memory. It worked in my son's computer just fine, and ran there with 2GB showing. Always shown 3GB in my system, as far as I know. No heat problems, and as I said the Setup/BIOS software sees 4GB.
The hard drive has been a problem since upgrade day one.
First pass was with a bare OEM hard drive that I'm almost positive was defective, and I returned without problem to Newegg. (This was before current hard drive -- telling what happened for diagnostic purposes) My motherboard has two IDE style connectors, one labeled "PRI EIDE", and the other a "PRI IDE." When I used the EIDE one, connected only to the new hard drive, I could see the new hard drive but not format it. The DVD drive was connected to the IDE connector, at the ribbon's terminal connection, and worked fine. In the past, I'd found that the DVD drive will not operate properly connected to the EIDE motherboard connector. The IDE cable I used was one out the parts bin.
So I made sure things were all on cable select, I used the master connection for the DVD drive on its ribbon, put the IDE hard drive on another EIDE connector, and finally can see the DVD drive. Unfortunately, the new IDE hard drive drive was recognized as a SCSI device, even though its not one. I couldn't access it, couldn't format, and couldn't see it on "My Computer". On hardware properties, it showed up with its identifying model number but with that darn SCSI identification. When I used the same ribbon for both the DVD and the hard drive, the computer had trouble recognizing either, regardless of whether I used jumpers for master, slave, or cable select.
At that point went to Administrative tools and tried to format the thing, but while it would allow format to 99% as soon as it reached 100% it balked and errored "Unable to Format." Always happened that way, and since all else seemed OK I assumed it was a bad drive and sent it back to Newegg as said.
So, now to the current events. I ordered a new drive, and got a round "IDE ATA 100/133" 80 pin cable to make sure the parts bin ones weren't cheapie DVD ribbons with fewer actual wires.
In short, never got anything to work with the new cable. Went back to the old generic ribbons, and could get the DVD to show up if the IDE drive was unpowered. Tried cable select, and had problems with boot -- the system kept asking me to insert appropriate boot media, even though neither were supposed to be boot drives. Switched cable positions, same result Tried making both slaves by jumpers, and neither worked. Tried making the entirely blank hard drive master, and the DVD slave, and the DVD wasnt visible.
But with this setting, ON THE FIRST BOOT ONLY, I was able to see the new drive, but only on Administrative Tools. It first showed up as an unformatted drive, so I selected and formatted it as a NTSF drive. Failed the first time, but completed the second and was thereafter described as "healthy". I thought problem was solved...
Except the DVD was invisible, and unusable. (Its my only removable media drive). I powered down, thinking I'd be fiddling again, but then decided to do a whole drive mirror backup while I had the new drive working. I restarted, and...well....found that the new drive was again invisible, this time permanently. I rebooted several times and never saw the sucker again. Mind you, there had been NO changes at all between the successful run and everything that followed.
Again popped the case, tried a few more ideas, and eventually gave up for the day. I had to unpower the new hard drive, and use the slave ribbon connection with the DVD on cable select.
I did not try the EIDE connector on the new drive, the one that read the first drive as SCSI, partly because I dont understand the difference and partly because I've never had anything work right connected there. (At the initial build I'd tried the DVD drive there and the system wouldnt acknowledge it properly.) Also, its at the extreme far side of the motherboard, with the only video card position just inside there -- and its ALMOST impossible to get to the connector or to get the cable to pass over the card and still reach the DVD drive in the case's lowest slot.
