Computer Troubleshooting 2

As I promised this is the continuing stoooory, of pc's that have gone to the dogs.....

Ok, bad plagarized and modified quote from the "Muppets" but still..

I am officially now on a budget as far as my computer spending goes, so I'm always looking for deals on things that can improve my existing systems, instead of building new ones. Recently someone brought in a brand new Seagate 40GB HD, I was like ooooh!! So I take it home and put it in my second pc with the video capture card, thinking it will be good to have a disk designated to recording my favourite shows.

So I put the drive in as secondary slave configuration since the primary cable is already full and the secondary cable already has CD drive on it. I jumper the drive properly, and boot up the system, the bios recognizes the drive and it boots into windows. Alright things are looking good till I try to use the drive, it isn't listed anywhere in Windows, not in "My Computer", not in device manager, not in Administrative tools.

Ok, ok, I say to myself, maybe the drive is in parked mode or something, it did after all come with an install disk. I look at the install disk warily, not wanting a drive boot manager or drive overlay on my system, and I shouldn't need it, but I bite the bullet and run the install program..

The install software detects the drive and the correct configuration spot and all. So my fears are somewhat subdued, but when I reboot, the system won't pass the bios anymore..... I can hit the delete button and the message changes to entering setup, but it never actually gets there, much less past the bios post to boot into windows. In fact, the boot gets up to the HD detection and hangs.

Those fears that were subdued come raging back up screaming "I told you so!!". During the next week I try small changes to the setup trying to get it to boot. I unplug the power to the primary drives and it will boot, plug them back in and no go...

Unplug the new HD and still no boot. I get all upset and let it sit for a week.... Not wanting to spend any money on getting it back up and working. Well Sunday night, I unplug everything, pull it the mouse, keyboard and monitor out to the main table where I can work on things. I pull all the drives out all the PCI cards out and reset the heat sink on the processor. Now all I have in is the video card and the RAM.

Boots up through the bios, ok, we have a starting point. now I plug in the new HD, the CD drive and the floppy. The system won't even post anything, processor fan tries to spin and stops.

Ok, reset the bios and try again, same result. Hmm, ok, now down to 3 things that could be the problem. I unplug the floppy drive and the system boots! Ok, drive is recognized, all looks good, so I say to myself lets try the other HD's since I didn't pay attention to the power cabls, the floppy is just normally plugged in with the main HD's. Lo and behold it was the floppy drive the whole time. For no apparent reason the floppy drive decided to crater and my system was down for a week!!