Present Perfect

Jan, thanks for your concern. To ease your mind, yes the data was on it, but the solution is simple - I'll just pay for the recovery service with the surplus on the account.

Lots of people mailed me with advice, which was great. Some people called me stupid, which I agree with. I went out on Friday to collect my PC I had brought in (the damn thing stops booting at random points) and they told me "the wires were connected wrong". Which is odd, considering I had tested the board with no wires attached at all except for CPU fan, ATX connector and board connector. I just tried to boot the thing by holding a screwdriver to the power pins, which worked fine. Well, except for that nothing showed up on the monitor.

Anyway, in a store that doesn't care for its customers it's pretty hard to argue over this sort of thing. They charged me 35 euros for it after showing that it booted. I bought 2 250GB disks to serve as a software RAID and went home. The machine worked for a whole day before giving up at the third reboot. Now I wonder if it's worth it to go back at all. The only thing I haven't tried replacing yet is the fan and the CPU. I tried with another fan, but I don't trust that one to work at all. Same for the CPU - I have no idea if taking out the old 2GHz P4 CPU I have that I know works and putting it in this new motherboard is supposed to work at all.

I'm at loss for ideas here, suggestions always welcome as usual.

Jan, thanks for your concern. To ease your mind, yes the data was on it, but the solution is simple - I'll just pay for the recovery service with the...