Thursday, October 29, 2009

My hardware woes (and a garage update)

The garage progresses. J-mom and our wonderful friend made much headway. I hope to get shelves up on the other side so we can finish it up. Then we can make the kids go play in there.

I am fixing a couple of our computers. One of my laptops has a bad hard drive. I ordered a replacement, but I ordered a SATA instead of PATA. And, of course, Tiger Direct didn't accept returns on the item because it was OEM. I wound up having to order another new hard drive and I decided to buy a USB enclosure for the SATA one so I'll have a handy mobile external hard drive.

My next computer project is causing a bit more grief. For quite some time, I've been getting a CMOS Checksum error when booting up my primary desktop. I thought it was a bad battery, but after replacing it, I still got the error. Much Google-fu later, I came to the conclusion it was the motherboard. I ordered a replacement and went to install it. Everything was going fine until I got to the part where I needed to connect the front-panel items to the motherboard headers. All my devices have 8/10 pin connectors. The new motherboard has 4/5 pin connectors. Now I have to figure out how to make these connections. It's giving me a headache.

I have found tons of information about regarding the various types of motherboard headers. Tons of information about how to make sure you connect the correct wire to the correct header. I've found next to nothing regarding how to connect a 8/10-pin connector to a motherboard with a 4/5-pin header.

Anyone with any information on my latter problem here, please feel free to overshare.

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