I’m sorry Vista, you’re not the bad apple
It’s ****ing Gigabyte to blame for the 10+ hours lost at troubleshooting their broken product!
Started out with Vista not setting up properly ~ ie, taking forever. Then it became, “is it Vista’s fault or Lite-On’s fault or motherboard’s fault for the DVD drive not working?” After an entire night of trouble shooting by swapping out parts, I eliminated Vista as the cause, and Lite-On. When I plugged in a HDD IDE device, it wouldn’t read kept freezing up the startup process. With this discovery, came the idea that … maybe they have a bios update to fix the IDE controller!
Well, they didn’t have such. So I started looking at PCI IDE controllers, knowing that’s where the problem lies. I didn’t want to go through RMA the motherboard, and possibly having to call MS to reinstall Vista on another MB… and besides, putting all the crap in that little case was hard enough the first time! Anyway… after much soul searching, I came across a forum that said these magical words, “maybe you should try replacing the IDE cable… a bad IDE cable makes crazy things happen!” So I thought about all the crazy things that I’ve done to test the IDE port including downloading Knoppix in believing Vista was causing the issues. I mean, this wasn’t a normal error ~ drive detected at startup fine, driver was fine, it loads some part of the DVD/CD fine (ie, Linux bootloader and Vista bootldr)… so, I was thoroughly confused.
Anyway, I had decided I would go get another DVD drive tomorrow ~ it would have new IDE cable, and new DVD drive for me to test with. But then, the idea came to me… “there are three prongs to the IDE cable! What if it’s just the distant one that’s not connected properly but the two close ones are?!” I immediately stopped brushing my teeth then, and went and tried that out and boom, everything started flyin! Even Vista loaded faster! WOW!
So much time spent because one little wire within the IDE cable was broken and there was no way to diagnose it without having good spare parts ready. Ah, computers are such pain in the ass sometimes!