I've got an old Dell Dimension that I'm not ready to replace, so I've been upgrading it here and there. One problem with the machine is that it only has one 5.25" slot for a CD drive (hey, it was a bargain), so I had to replace the original CD drive with a CD-RW a while back so that I could start backing up my data. Trouble is, I've never been entirely happy with my CD-RW -- it burned CD's quite well, but had trouble reading any CD with a really big file on it. I don't know why, and their technical support never really believed me. In any case, I decided to upgrade to a CD-RW/DVD combo drive to improve the situation and get DVD support at the same time! Okay, enough backstory...

So I slap the drive into the box, turn it on, and it hangs at the Dell logo. Uh-oh. Shut it down. Make sure everything is connected right. Check the BIOS settings. Start scouring the Web. Google. The drive manufacturer. The drive distributor. Dell support, faq, knowledge base. My fourth attempt to figure out the right search keywords at the Dell community forum finally struck gold. Somebody with the exact same problem I had with the exact same drive (Samsung SM-352 DVD/CD-RW, distributed as I/O Magic 52x24x52 Internal IDE CD-RW / 16x DVD Combo Drive, purchased from CompUSA, in case anyone is Googling for a solution to the same problem).

There's something comforting about knowing that someone else out there has your exact same problem, even if they didn't find a solution. Fortunately, this person did. As it turns out, the machine wasn't hung, the BIOS was just taking upwards of two minutes to figure out that drive at every boot cycle. After I let it sit for long enough, it booted and everything was fine. The post recommended upgrading the BIOS, and that worked. (Okay, so maybe upgrading the BIOS was an obvious solution from the start -- I'm not much a hardware guy.)

So, I'm happy. And reminded yet again that non-technical people don't have a chance when it comes to installing hardware -- of course, they're probably smart enough to know that. :-)