 » 
IDE cables = evil
I have windows xp on my 80gb Western Digital (which is less than a month old), and SuSe 9 on my 30gb (3 years old), and I just switch the end connector of the 80-pin eide cable that came with the WD to the HD with the OS I want to boot into. Usually it works like a charm, no problems.
This time, I put the connector on the 30gb, and boot, and it says 'OS not found'. I booted into XP again; worked fine. I put the linux HD in, checked the cable connection, same thing. I tried switching the CD-RW IDE cord to the channel previously occupied by the HD, and tried to boot into linux first. It gave me a 'kernel panic - unable to mount root.fs on 16:03' (or something similar) error, so I tried to boot into XP. It booted mostly into the OS, and crashed. I adjusted some BIOS settings, still no luck, and now if I put either HD on that IDE channel, it won't detect them. I can get the linux HD to work by plugging it into the CD-RW IDE channel, but since my case is so small, I have to hold the HD parallel to the case, on the outside of it. That will not do permanently, obviously. I don't know if I should get a new cable for the hard drive channel, or a PCI IDE adapter (not really an option; my motherboard's 3 PCI slots are full already), or a new motherboard (not a bad idea, but I'd need a new case as well, and I can't afford to buy things like that at whim).
Any suggestions would be welcome. I'll sleep on it, and troubleshoot a bit more in the morning. The need isn't terribly pressing, but it would certainly be nice to have my desktop PC back up. I do have the laptop to use, but no other desktops in which to test the cord or hard drives, without asking the neighbors (who I really don't think would be willing to help anyway).
| 
Linear Mode
