X4000, it was the same for me, building and "un building" computers was one of my hobby as a kid too
My motherboard fried a couple years ago in the middle of a LAN party :/ I was so annoyed ! Lol
And just the same, well, my drives were IDE and my computer kept seeing them as SATA actually ... Weird enough, I went to buy new IDE cables and everything worked wonder after that... I never really quite understood why :/
Though, it's at that time that I decided that computer was an inexact science !!! With lots of randomness !
My ram fried too one day and my computer kept giving random errors, I formatted a couple times, reinstalled everything,... Did it again and each time I was rebooting I had a different error ! I was so frustrated before I understood that my ram was the problem ! Lol
I've never had any course in computers whatsoever to learn, I just learned by myself and by doing mistakes, learned a lot but what a huge loss of time :/ lol