Just saw my first Miata on craigslist. Wow it looks like complete **** compared to what it used to.
http://cincinnati.craigslist.org/ctd/4057778056.html

 

Yeah, realistically, I can't see her making a full recovery from this.

Thanks man. I had planned on making it out. I'm actually having trouble remembering why I couldn't make it. Maybe next time I can make it out and actually not leave early.

 

Anyone ever drink Moxie? Love the stuff! I knew of it, but wasn't even aware it was still in production. Found it, and love it. Like a mix of root beer and pepsi, with a slight bitter taste/feel. Supposedly it still has medicinal properties like a lot of colas used to have.

 

******* WORK YOU PIECE OF ****! Bios and OS will not detect my new HDD. It's powered and spooling up, I've tried different cables, nothing works.

Well, actually just now got it to be recognized by the OS, but it will not initialize. It says there is in i/o error. Jesus, just work!

 

Any time I've had problems with new HDDs, its always been fixed by toggling ide/ahci mode in the bios, but it sounds like youre beyond that point.

 

Set the master and slave jumpers correctly?

 

When was the last time you saw master and slave jumpers on a hard drive. Can you even buy an ATAPI drive anymore?

 

Just make sure you plug them in to the right connector on the cable

 

Was about to say, the drives do technically have the pins for the jumpers, but that is only for compatibility issues with much older chipsets and whatnot. At least I think that's all. I haven't had to mess with jumpers in quite a while.

I'm almost thinking it's a motherboard problem. Earlier when transferring files between my two existing drives, I got the same I/O error message that I was getting for the new drive. My transfer rates dropped to 1.5MB/s, and some of the files started prompting the "retry, skip or cancel" window. then it pretty much stopped transferring all together. Not exactly sure about what is going on here. Everything has worked fine up till recently when the secondary hard drive has become slow and sluggish, now this mess. Maybe the SATA controller on the mobo? I would think that would be something that would just fail all together. What else could cause these issues?

 

AH! ****! ****! ****! I don't think it's related, but I backed up my data on the external drive just in time. My backup drive went from being slow, to being toast. I tried to run the WD Utility on it, and it kept getting stuck on bad sectors. After running a few more tests, I went to check it out on my computer and it was no longer showing up as a drive. Disk Management was showing it there, but not partitioned and not initialized... I ran a zeros write on it, and now I'm reformatting it and seeing if maybe it's usable still.

Could this be related by a failing motherboard controller messing up drives?

 

Take the cartridge out of the console and blow in it. That usually helps.

 

Do we have any people who work in law, or have law degrees? I have some questions I would like to ask you via PM, if so, and if you feel like taking the time.

^ I miss the cartridge days.

And apparently the HDD just got corrupted somehow. A format seemed to fix it. All tests indicate it is a good drive, and seems to be working well so far. ???

 

You seem to have all the symptoms I had when my Dell went south on me. Turns out it was all the MB, specifically the HDD controller. I lost a lot of stuff in that crash; I will never, ever buy from Dell again.

 

Dell farms out the mb just like the rest of them. Don't hate the Dell, hate the commodity pc market.

 

To be fair, pretty much every manufacturer has had a bad run of luck at some point. Everyone remembers the famous IBM DeathStar, but nobody remembers the fact that aside from the 75GXP, HGST made some of the absolute best, most reliable consumer hard drives of their time.

I've had a number of Dell computers, at least a dozen combined desktops and laptops over the past 14 years. Aside from a run of bad keyboards in the Latitude series in the early 2000s, I've never had a serious hardware failure in any of 'em, not even a power supply, and some of these machines I've kept for 5-6 years. My personal laptop right now is a Dell E4200 which I absolutely love, and I wouldn't hesitate to but another.

Frankly, I don't really care what name-brand is stuck on the side of my computer. Aside from the very bottom-end of the marketspace, they're all pretty much the same in terms of build quality and reliability these days.

 

My last computer purchase was a Dell, probably 10-12 years ago. Ever since then, I build my own ****. Never again will I buy a machine pieced together with substandard parts in a factory. That Dell never gave me much problem if I recall.

Hopefully this motherboard isn't going out on me. It's only 6 months old, and it's one of ASUS top of the line and most expensive boards with overwhelmingly good ratings across the board. Supposedly "built with military grade parts". Whatever that means. So far the old HDD seems to be working well. I'm going to hold my breath and hope it was just a coincidence that the new drive was DOA and my old drive threw a fit within hours of one another.

 

I've had reasonably good experiences with Dell and Lenovo. I currently have an E4200 and an E6420 that have seen plenty of abuse and work just fine.

My only pet peeve is manufacturers that fill a regular-sized desktop PC with non-standard, proprietary connections and parts. I understand when it's a laptop or a small format desktop...but when it's a full size case, there's just no excuse other than attempting to force your customers to purchase replacement parts from you.

 

 

The reason for the Dell hate is because they used KNOWN bad capacitors (because they were cheap, naturally) on the boards, and refused to do anything about it when MB started failing. I only discovered this after I bought the thing, it failed and I tried to figure out what was wrong.

A company that cheaps out, then screws it's customers when cheap stuff fails deserves to die, as do the executives who made the decision.

 

I was freaking out earlier trying to find parts to scavenge, and looking in my old Dell and Compaq cases, only to find proprietary plastic HDD cages, odd sized screws and other **** that was unnecessarily complicated on non standard. I'm always amused to go back and look at those old computer and see how little space was filled up in these huge *** cases, then only one fan to move air through the entire thing. My current case is pretty jammed full, even with it being a full ATX, and it has 8 fans on it. This thing could probably lift off if I pointed all of the fans down, and throttled them up to full power. They move 135CFM each.