Well, yesturday was one of those days. You all know when the most obvious thing is right infront of you and you just cant see it. Well Since 11am i was trying to load win2k on a machine. The install kept restarting - meaning after it would be done copying files it woudl reboot and not boot off the hd and would only boot off the cdrom to start the install again. I tried everything. I mean everything. I downloaded diagnostic software for the HD and ran it and did their special format for windows, used NTFS and and FAT32 and everything.
So 8PM (11 hours later) i realize the hd has been written to because i see used space. But it wont boot. Well the bios is one of those that when you do boot order, you dont do "cdrom, harddrive" its cdrom, "hdd-0". So i connected the hd to the wrong connector on the cable it should have been hdd1. 9 hours later windows is installing and i finish fixing it up at 1am.... i wanted to take a leak on that machine, but it would have just caused more problems :(

I know the feeling.... hence, I've stopped building computers... :)

I feel you. I wanted to upgrade a very old laptop of mine. I had redhat on there but wanted to put on Slackware 8.1. This particular laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, no problem I'll boot from CD.

Wrong. Won't boot the Slack 8.1 CD. I make 3 copies of the CD ( downloaded from 3 different servers ). Finally I had to just boot the 8.0 CD and then perform an "upgrade".

Sometimes I'm extra glad my profession is Computers... :)

This is why im a programmer and not a hardware guy... but even in software programming you still make dumb mistakes.

It's usually the simple things that'll get you. :)

its always the simple things. All the hard problems in life already have been answered by someone else. I guess thats why I can bake a cake by using instructions from the net but I cant make pancakes that taste good :)

I find that it's easier to take a break after awhile and come back with a fresh mind. After a couple of hours I would have stopped what I was doing and left the room. Sometimes I will even go out somewhere just to forget about the situation at hand. Then return and try again. More times than not, I find the problem very shortly after returning.

i always want to do, but i cant find it in my to quit even for a short time. I keep thinking "wait, mabey this fixed it. lest just see if it worked..." and its a cycle

Recently, spent two days (a few hours here and there) debugging a php script and kept missing one of those simple things (= != == ,you know). Gave up. Got some extra sleep. Woke up and saw it right away.

Hmm I should have learned from that. Time to stop working and get some rest.

TTFN

Whenever I get stumped, I get up and walk away.

Then, I usually have the answer come to me.

Originally posted by markblair
I find that it's easier to take a break after awhile and come back with a fresh mind. After a couple of hours I would have stopped what I was doing and left the room. Sometimes I will even go out somewhere just to forget about the situation at hand. Then return and try again. More times than not, I find the problem very shortly after returning.

I agree. Sometimes, I go to sleep with a problem and wake up with the solution. It's scary.

Hardware is gay. But not as gay as this stupid font thingy !! Its not letting me change my font in my reply!