Honestly, tons of things could have killed it. It isn’t uncommon for the drive/controller board to just eat it. Fire up a PC with just the suspected bad HD in it, and listen closely to the drive. If you hear a repeated pattern of ticking and it doesn’t finish boot/POST (should get to a NO OS FOUND or some such)…

PSU on the bottom doesn’t necessarily alleviate the space issue as often times it’s located directly below the MoBo. Therefore you still have the same problem. Also with the PSU mounted on top, most cases leave some space in the bottom these days for double width cards (rare that they are down there)

Looking at his pictures, I can’t tell. Regardless, I’ve never really had dust issues with my fan on the bottom (my case is on wheels however, so it’s a little above the carpet), and i don’t have any filters on my case. PSU is about 7 years old now.

Eh, I admit I’m not a great parallel parker. It’s just not a thing where I am. Honestly the only place it’s occasionally needed is down town street parking, and even then it rare.

Power supply on the bottom has been the standard for most enthusiast PC’s for a while. This way it’s separate from the rest of the case, and not pulling in the hot air from the top of the case. Running cooler = more efficient power delivery and less chance of a failure.

Sata gives 0 craps as long as the device is connected and detected by BIOS. Boot order is determined in BIOS by selecting the device itself (usually). You’ll want to make sure it’s set to the proper drive after you connect a new drive just to be safe. Sometimes BIOS is dumb like that. If the system will not boot/POST…

Wait, Master and Slave? Is this an IDE drive? Check the jumpers, make sure they’re set appropriately. Usually they’re either marked on the drive label or on the PCB on the bottom. You can’t have 2 masters or 2 slaves on the same cable.

True. More work than it’s worth though.

If windows doesn’t find it, but BIOS does, there’s a decent chance the drive may be corrupted / dead. Check the disk manager, see if it sees the drive. As long as windows detects the drive as connect and as a HDD, it should show up there. It may tell you it’s damaged and needs to be formatted though. If it’s still not…

Happy to help. Also, as another reader mentioned, if the drive is larger than 2TB, use GPT (I don’t remember if 10 defaults to this) for the partition table. If it’s not, then it doesn’t matter really. TBH, you should probably just use GPT regardless.

Hah, I work IT. Explaining this stuff to people is my bread and butter.

The second hard drive (if it’s new) just needs to be partitioned and formatted. Assuming windows 10, right click on the windows button and go to Disk Management / Computer Management > Disk Management. Under disk management, you should see a couple drives. Your main drive with windows and its partitions, and a second…

I guess, haha. I was driving it around 2006 and it was a hand-me-down from my dad, so it was by no means new.

Hah. Well tbh, the thing was a PoS. Not rusted or anything, but everything ran on vacuum, and this thing had leaks everywhere. It got so bad at one point that it would die when I pushed the clutch in to stop at a light, so I got real good a pop starting it. It took my dad and I an entire day to track them all down and…

It was my first car and I was a stupid teenager. Car never felt like it was going to break loose at least, and was actually fairly tossable. (It was the nicer once with the V6 and the cool digital dash)

Heh, I was in an 89 beretta w/ cheap all seasons

Ugh, that road. I did a few stints as a counselor at the Boy Scout camp there when I was younger. Nothing like being at the back of an 18 car line going 5-10 under because the person at the front won’t pull off. Conversely though, coming back down was fun, at least until my dad pointed out I was squealing the tires on…

What? That’s BS and you should smack whoever told you that upside the head. I do that all the time if there’s room and I’m a local. Problem is people don’t usually leave room and/or don’t know how big their car is, so they don’t. I’ve seem people with 3-4 feet between them and the car ahead, and they won’t pull past…

God I hear that. I had an F150 driver run me into the center median about 5 years back. I was literally the only car coming at him, and it was a bright red 01 Camaro. SUV/Truck drivers are oblivious. I actually won’t let them in front of me on the highway because they always leave massive gaps and in traffic and I get…

They’ve changed their tune on that BTW. AFAIK the wireless one works now