The son of a friend inherited a new computer I put togeather, when his computer seemingly croaked. I took it with me when I delivered his new one.

It is one his father had originally, but son bought new MB abit kw7 with a sempron 3.2 cpu. It had 768 mb ram and 2 HDD w/0 any raid, a 60 gb quantom fireball and a 40 gb maxtor. He was running xp home.

He gave the following history. He was printing and the printing was lage and it started to slow down to a crawl, so he went out and bought 512 more ram to put in. After opening the case and placing the ram no boot. Changing the ram back did nothing.

What I've found seems wierd, therfore the post. Niether HDD will show in the bios as master no matter what I jumper it to be or where I place it on the cable. In replacing the ide cable I notice a tear in the old cable. My question. Could that tear in the cable have fried the 2 HDD's? That's my only explanation.

BTW A new HDD does fix the problem It can boot right up with linux.