Computer bits

I have had a bit of bad luck and weird stuff with my desktop computer at the moment.

This is a rather pc-geek text, skip the italics bit if these make you glaze over :D - or just check yesterday's backblip, that one is low tech as can be. Or check some cute dog pics

Last week at some point suddenly the CD/DVD drive was no longer visible in windows xp. It was visible at boot but not in windows. I uninstalled loads of things (including sp3, but that was not the culprit) I did some research, tried a few suggestions, including several deletes in the registry (should be fine, since i have loads of registry backup utilities... but read on).

It only got worse, and the CD suddenly wasn't in bios anymore so I realised it was not necessarily a windows issue but could be hardware. I did try swapping IDE cables and positions around, and eventually exhausted all my options.

By that time I also had things worse in windows (remember those registry deletes?) would lose all keyboard and mouse function as soon as windows started.

Now this is the worst that can happen because of course all my "restore and fix" type utilities either
* need you to log in to windows, using a keyboard.
* work on a bootable CD

So I couldnt boot a cd to run a registry restore, neither could i log in to windows to do anything, not even to the console

Catch 22, eh?

Thank goodness I had a laptop as by then 3 days had passed (I cant spend all my time messing with puters!).

In the end I ordered an usb enclosure to put a cd drive in and boot my utilities, but no matter what I did could not get either of my existing DVD drives to work in the original computer. So I bought a new one (Sata instead of ide) and lo and behold that works. I'm still puzzled why these 2 IDE DVD drives suddenly wouldnt work on either IDE chains, when normal hard disks worked fine on both. As if the mobo suddenly couldnt deal with CD Roms...

Bought a new super silent drive too, so will probably mess the whole pc up while trying to migrate...

Anyway, these are some of the bits, unused cables, old drives, plastic boxes etc. left over from the whole operation. I thought it was worth trying a blip