Alright, so as many of you know, today was the big Windows Vista retail release. Working at Best Buy, we had to sell all the old XP machines (Displays, boxed, open items, everything) before Vista was released. Failure to do so meant the company would have to ship the XP machines back to the manufacturer and only get a fraction of what the cost of the machines originally was.
Sooo, by today management was itchy enough that I coaxed them to sell me one of the last two XP machines in the store at a reduced price (40%-ish)... I will not give model specifics, but the machine itself was retailing for over one thousand US dollars. It has 2GB DDR2 memory, a Core 2 Duo E6400, a DVD-RW (standard nowadays, eh?), a built-in TV-Tuner, two 200 GB SATA HDD's, and a PCI wireless card (Missing its antennae).
After snagging the tasty treat for $499 I nearly poo'd myself in joy. That is, until I looked inside... Oy! Retail case!
Of course, manufacturers love to make tiny, obscurely designed cases in order to appeal to customers aesthetically. However, these cases often limit upgrade-ability. In this case, there was one hard drive mounted secretly between the empty "USB Pocket Drive" bay and the DVD-RW, and the other was somehow screwed to the bottom (!) of the case.
I have a couple other HDD's (IDE) from my current/old PC that I want information off of, and I don't want to use a goofy HDD USB Enclosure because I hope to use these as actual drives. So, I figured my solution was either. A) Try to Jimmy-rig it with tape inside the case, or B) Transfer cases.
I chose "B" because my skill with tape is less than perfect and I didn't want to burn up my new PC somehow.
So, as I get a couple hours into this whole ordeal, I'm ready to plug in my older two hard-disk drives... but... uhhh... There's no IDE interface on this tiny- mini-micro-miniminibaby-tiny ATX motherboard. *Falls on face*
D'oh! Just to make sure I wasn't overlooking it somehow (Even with the diagram pulled up from HP's support section) I visited HP's online chat support. Sure enough, this model doesn't include an IDE interface.
So, I figure I will at least get the other two (SATA) drives up and going tonight, and I'll just go buy a PCI PATA card or whatnot tomorrow.
Uhhh,.... my ThermalTech powersupply doesn't have any SATA connectors! I thought it did, but on closer inspection they were some other oddly-misshaped black power connections. So, tomorrow I will have to go buy some SATA power cable-converter thingers too!
So here I am with a $1000+ PC in shambles all over the floor... I don't know if this is going to work, break, or explode.
A couple questions:
1) On the power switch, the original case had a single two-pronged plug, whereas my case has two (A "+" and "-") single plugs. I know where they go, but if they're reversed by accident (It's not labeled anywhere on the board, or online!) will the PC explode or just not turn on?
2) One of my case fans has a four-prong connection (flat) [oooo] but the motherboard lists no place for this. The only place it can fit is a four-pinned connector labeled F_LINE_IN
Here is the schematic, thanks for the help! :)
~Kujila