Stage 28: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the MAME ...

Sometimes I even amaze myself:

Having finally procured the IDE to SATA Hard Drive Converter I needed to make my new 200GB HDD speak to my motherboard for my non-MAME desktop computer, I made an amusing discovery upon cracking open my case for the umpteenth time in this project:

My ECS K7S5A Pro motherboard which is incapable of supporting SATA HDDs is in fact NOT an ECS K7S5A Pro motherboard at all. I realized this about 20 seconds into attaching the Converter when I noticed two small ports cryptically marked "SATA1" and "SATA2" off to the left of the IDE ports. Surely I had not overlooked these damned things on nearly a dozen previous occasions inside the case?

After connecting the SATA HDD to these ports, the answer was a most decidedly "yes I had". The HDD worked fine, these were indeed SATA ports and now I have a $15 IDE to SATA Converter collecting dust in a drawer.

Un-fucking-believable, not only because I had somehow not seen these two in-plain-view SATA ports on the countless instances I had cracked open the case of this machine in recent weeks, but also because I had chosen to verify that the ECS K7S5A Pro motherboard did not support SATA several times on the internet instead actually, you know, LOOKING at the damned board in my machine. Sigh.

How'd This Happen?: My best guess is that back about a year ago when I took my board into the shop because the USB ports weren't working, they good folks at Mysterybyte Computers gave me a loaner board which I promptly fried while flashing the BIOS without knowing what I was doing (not recommended, BTW). Apparently my original board was FUBAR so they replaced it with a new board which was "exactly the same" as my old one.

This term clearly means something different than what I think it does, because the board in my main PC is definitely not an ECS K7S5A Pro board. I have no idea what kind of board it is, but not only does it have the SATA ports that it shouldn't, it's currently exceeding its alleged maximum 1GB RAM capacity by 512MB since I put an extra stick in there during the Great Computer Swap after I got Ward's machine. So whatever is in my PC, it's better than what I thought it was. Woo woo!

I think I'll run some diagnostics when I get home and see what in blazes I actually have running on that damned machine. Knowing, as they say, is half the battle.

Update: Apparently I'm rocking an ASUS K8N motherboard in my PC instead of that ECS piece of crap I thought I had. It's not a hell of a lot better, but it's defintely a small step up. Huzzah for free hardware upgrades!