I'm setting up a "new" computer for my mom, a Dell XPS R350. (She's using a 120 MHz Apple PowerPC right now. And in case you're wondering, my dad doesn't want to buy her a better machine and I don't have the money; if I did, I'd get something nicer than this rubbish secondhand Dell.) Anyway, I used the guts of another Dell, an Optiplex GX-1, to upgrade it, plus some other stuff. Right now it's got: - A P3 Katmai 450 MHz processor - twin 30 GB Quantum Fireball hard drives (which I plan to use in software RAID1) - A CD and a Zip drive - A Turtle Beach sound card of some sort - A Matrox Millenium 2 PCI video card - 448 MB of PC100 RAM The original setup (which worked fine): - The P3 Katmai processor - One 4 GB and one 6 GB hard drive - The CD and Zip drives - The Turtle Beach sound card - An ATI Rage 128 video card - What appeared to be a TV card - 384 MB of PC100 RAM Those are the only changes I made. Anyway, right now it's failing to recognize *any* of the IDE drives. Not just the new hard drives, but also the CD and Zip drives, which worked fine before; the BIOS says there's nothing hooked up to either IDE channel. The only thing it can boot from is the floppy drive. I double-checked the jumpers on the IDE drives and they're set right; I made sure the IDE ribbons were plugged in correctly (they were, despite not being polarized ); I tried booting without the extra RAM (some old computers can't handle more than 384 MB); I looked in the BIOS to see if there was a way to manually configure the drives... Nada. I'm stumped. The only thing I can think of is ESD, which I'm hoping this isn't. Any advice? Edit: N/M, the notches on the IDE ribbon plugs were on the wrong side. Weird.
