Never, EVER AGAIN am I building a new computer. I have spent the whole evening trying to transfer files from my old IDE hard drive (no OS, just storage), on to this new thing. First I tried using LAN, but neither were having any of it. Kept getting message that 'Home' couldn't do something, neither could see the other, and only having one monitor made the job that much bloody harder anyway, so I gave that up as a bad idea, and decided to physically swap the hard drive into the new PC. Simple, you would think? Was it bloody hell! First I had to remove the SATA connectors, to enable me to fit the hard drive in. In order to do this, I had to remove the floppy IDE cable. Even with pressing the release clip, yet another SATA connector came away from the mobo rendering it useless. This wasn't through being ham fisted, these things are just poorly fitted, and I've a good mind to complain to Abit about it.
Having eventually installed the hard drive, and put everything back together, I fired up the PC, and everything had slowed to a crawl. I mean, literally 10 minutes to boot into Windows and load the desktop. I thought it might have been a one off, dealing with the 'new' IDE drive, but rebooted, and the same thing happened. Checked in My Computer, and the IDE drive was listed, but I thought maybe I'd connected the wrong bit of the IDE cable, so swapped it for the secondary connection, rebooted, and Windows loaded like lightning, but the drive was nowhere to be seen. Maybe the jumpers are wrong? Of course, once the drive was in the case, I couldn't read the label to say where the jumpers should go, so had to dismantle everything again to get the f**king thing out to read the jumper instructions, of which there were 4 different sets. How am I supposed to know which ones to use? There are 4 different combinations for Cable Select, 4 different for Primary, 4 different for secondary, and I can't remember what the last one was. To add to this, the writing is so small, I can barely read it, and in fact, can't read what the four different sets of jumper combinations are actually called. OK, so might be time for en eye test, but even so, why is everything so complicated? In the end, I chose one of the Cable Select options, to be safe, and reinstalled the hard drive. Booted up, and no drive seen. Changed the jumpers three or four times, but still no drive seen. Changed to the secondary IDE connector, and still nothing, then I realised I had the sodding thing the wrong way round.
Connected the IDE correctly, rebooted, and again, everything at a crawl.
I've now given up completely, and am building a hatred for this computer bordering on the psychotic. I wish I'd never started it, and it will be very lucky if it doesn't get thrown down the stairs at some point in the very near future. I have wasted a whole evening and achieved nothing except some hardening of the arteries, and to put it mildly, am f**king furious!!
