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Subject: "Building comp, HD problem - solved" Previous topic | Next topic
MykSat Dec-15-01 09:03 AM
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"Building comp, HD problem - solved"


  

          

I helped my friend build his computer today. I was letting him to the hands on building while I told him what to do and was doing basics like attaching the rails to the CD drive and daisy chaining his fans together.

Boot up, lights, fans, beep and action. BIOS isn't detecting the Maxtor HD, FDISK isn't detecting fixed drive. Check the jumpers, try the alternate setting and Maxi-Blast, Maxi-blast locks up.

Pull my WD slave out and hook it up, prepared to let him used it until he RMA's a new HD. This time the BIOS detected a drive, the CD drive as primary master. I look and he didn't set the CD drive as slave before he plugged it in. I didn't realize he had never changed or added a drive before. If I only could've found one of my dozen IDE cables around here we never would've noticed it.
We spent almost an hour messing around with this trying different settings and making sure plugs were plugged and jumpers were jumped right (of course except for the CD drive). Set the CD drive as slave and it boots right up and detects everything.

I wasn't too impressed with the SOYO K7VTA-PRO. It only had stand offs at the back and in the middle, leaving the IDE controller slots and RAM slots mostly unsupported. We didn't try out the sound, but everything seemed to work OK. And the capacitors aren't such a tight fit as with a KT7A-RAID.

With the stock HS/F for the retail T-bird 1.33 (266) I don't notice that much heat difference than with my T-bird 900. Granted we didn't push it that hard but I was expecting at least a 10°F difference sitting idle.

I can't say I'm that impressed with the 32bit 64MB video card enough to buy one and ditch my Voodoo3. The only real difference I noted was the lack of dithering in the sky on Q3A and possibly some lighting effects (T&L?) differences in Giants. The decision between a new video card or a 2x20GB RAID array or to hold off until the price of the cards come down isn't going to be an easy one.

Well, there's another satisfied homebuilder who won't be going back to branded POS's.

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History teaches us that history has taught us nothing.

  

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