Bought a new PSU.

Ripped out the old PSU.

Fitted the new PSU.

New PSU has rather less power cables than old PSU.

New PSU has exactly enough power cables to power my two hard drives, two optical drives and one floppy drive.

Old PSU had all this, plus an extra floppy drive power connector to power the Firewire controller card. New PSU does not.

Firewire controller card can’t drive the iPod without aforementioned power connector.

Ripped all cabling out, sacrificed floppy drive, tried to stretch floppy power connector to Firewire card. Couldn’t.

Moved Firewire card to spare PCI slot nearer drives. Cable now (just about) reaches.

Fire up PC, Windows says of Firewire card “This device cannot start. (Code 10)”.

Scream.

Reboot, reset ESCD data in BIOS. No joy.

Reboot, manually assign IRQs in BIOS. No joy.

Reboot, auto assign IRQs in BIOS, resetting ESCD data again for good measure. No joy.

Cry.

Rip out power cabling, sacrifice optical drives, move Firewire card to original slot, stretch power cable to card. Reboot.

Windows magically recognises Firewire card. It just completely refuses to recognise the iPod when I plug it into the dock. The cabling’s fine, because the iPod is happily recharging its battery. I am at a loss.

I am definitely buying a Mac.

[And as if by magic, it’s started working again. No reinstall, not even a reboot. How weird… Still getting a Mac though.]