I got my new machine up and running this weekend. If you’re interested, read on, though be warned that lengthy and arcane techno geekery is to follow….

Round 1, reported here earlier, involved a DOA motherboard or CPU. I never determined which was actually DOA, though I am strongly suspicious that it was the motherboard. Fortunately newegg was cool about it and let me ship both the motherboard and cpu back on exchange. I spent about 12-14 hours all told trying to get that B*&ch to post and by the end of it I was feeling like I should have just bought a Dell though. The process aggravated the hell out of me.

Anyway I got the replacement parts Friday and spent the weekend getting the new rig up and running. The stats, for anyone paying attention, were:

• New case (chieftech) with a 430 watt power supply (which was the main reason I got it)
• Abit KR7A motherboard
• Creative Soundblaster Audigy MP3
• 256 MB of ECC parity RAM from Crucial
• a 60 gb 7200 RPM ATA 100 drive from IBM
• A Radeon 8500 oem version from Newegg
• A Linksys 10/100 ethernet card
• an Athlon XP 1700 from AMD (retail edition so I can have the warranty)

Plus a heavy reliance on Viahardware website and their excellent FAQ’s, and the abit motherboard newsgroup.

I knew going into the install that I faced potential issues with the ram, the soundcard and the videocard, so I had prepared myself for the worst, but fortunately for me, preparation and a little luck spared me most of the problems others have had.

I installed the motherboard, ram and processor and checked if the machine would post. It did, which was a huge relief to me after the fiasco with the dead component/s from a few weeks earlier. So I installed all the rest of the hardware, paying particular attention to which PCI slots to put the audio and video cards, then adjusted the bios per the FAQ’s on viahardware.com, and rebooted.

Which caused the machine to fail to post. SHIT!

I reset the bios to factory defaults and the machine posted, so I knew it wasn’t any of the new hardware causing the problems, it was something in the bios settings. I went through 6 or 7 reboots mucking with settings before finally arriving at the conclusion that I couldn’t clock my RAM aggresively. After backing down the settings to moderate performance the machine was posting again. Time to install the drives and then the OS.

The drives went in without event. Aside from the 60 gigger IBM drive I was also installing a plextor burner, an Acer 52x cd-rom, and a 20 gigger 7200 rpm ata66 drive. I put the 60 as master on the primary channel with the reader as slave and I put the 20 gigger as slave on the second channel with the burner as master.

Next was the os install. I stuck the windows XP boot cd in (my license from Bowdoin, which has a license for all employees inclusive of home machines to be used for work, which this one definitely is) and it failed to boot. Setup would start but it would hang during the ‘now booting windows’ phase.

This was not good. After trying to force it to boot several times, I dug around on usenet for a while but couldn’t find anything conclusive, just a few suggestions.

One was to try and force the VIA 4in1 drivers, which contain driver’s for various pieces of the motheboard’s hardware, to install prior to the cd booting into windows, which you do by interrupting the boot process and using a floppy disk. The drivers were 1.55 megs. Floppies don’t hold that much data. An hour or so of bs followed whilst I tried various approaches to shoe-horning the files onto the disc and pruning the files such that they would fit on the disc and yada yada yada. Finally succeeding, I got the 4in1 drivers loaded before windows booted from the cd. It complained and then crashed. I tried this several times. No joy. Back to the drawing board. I should mention it was now 11 and I had been at this for about 6 hours.

Next was hardware. Which hardware could be causing it? Possibly some IDE device didn’t like being on the same channel as some other device, so I pruned it down to just the 60 gigger, and when that didn’t work I tried just the 20 gigger, which also didn’t work, so I abandoned that angle, figuring it was not the drives.

Next I screwed around with the RAM, trying it in each of the 4 slots, reseating it and so on. No joy.

Next I began to isolate components. I reduced the machine to just an old trident vga card in a pci slot. No joy. I tried it in various slots. No joy. What the devil was keeping this thing from booting?

It was now 1 AM and I was pretty frustrated. I invesitgated BIOS upgrades but there were none. I began to worry that the RAM I had was the issue but I had no other DDR ram so I had no way of checking. I again dug through usenet looking for an angle but came up with trying to force the install from another volume by copying the windows setup files to a drive from the cd and then installing another OS.

At this point, for giggles, I stuck in the Redhat 7.2 disc and the machine booted right up. Score one for the linux advocates, windows is easy to install my hairy ass. Since redhat worked I tried windows2k, which also failed to boot at the same point as Winxp. Next up was Windows 98.

Yee ha, bootage! I immediately copied the XP setup files onto the 20 gigger and tried installing from the hard drive. It got much farther into the process…and then crapped out. No Joy.

I became convinced that the issue must be that Win98 needs full working drivers for XP to upgrade over. I had interrupted every one of its attempts to install drivers for the hardware. I now went through the painful reboot filled process of getting Windows98 fully working. And failed. I had been smart enough to copy most of the files I would need to get XP running onto a cd before I dissected the old machine. But I hadn’t bothered with ethernet drivers for the LAN card since I knew XP had them built in. I got the video and sound cards going in 98 but not the LAN card. And every time I tried to run the XP installer it would mention that it really wanted to connect to Microsoft’s site for upgraded installer files. So I spent a chunk of time trying to get the damn lan card going with no success. No network connectivity. It was now 3 AM. I gave up in exhausted frustration and went to bed.

The next morning I slept till 11:30. I sat drinking the morning coffee and running through the newsgroups one last time. I kicked around the idea of just sticking with Windows 98 since I had it up and running and it has the best games compatibility of any OS, but I am entirely fed up with 98’s instability so after mulling it over I decided not to.

I ran across a reference to a bios setting for power management which was also tangled up with IRQ’s, ACPI or some similar acronym, so I tried turning that off.

joy!

12 hours after I had started, I finally had XP booted on the new hardware. I hastily assembled the rest of the pieces (sound and video card, lan card) and tried again.

joy! redux

So all my hardware was a go. It took about 2 hours to get the OS fully running with all the appropriate drivers. I didn’t face any significant problems, although I detest Creative’s habit of bloating their installer with a ton of useless crap. It took 30 minutes to get the sound card going and all I really needed was the damn sound drivers, but they forced me through a ton of other installs, including Acrobat. It’s a fucking sound card! Why are they making me jump through these hoops.

I also spent another 3-4 hours getting various software back on the box that I needed (ftp client, Winrar, Winace, Winzip, SSH, yada yada yada, you know the drill).

Anyway the machine’s now up and running. I have a couple of outstanding issues:

• It’s a known problem that Audigy cards have sound crackling issues with windows XP/the VIA chipset. While mine is definitely not as bad as others, I do have it, so far only when there is heavy drive activity and music playing at the same time. I’m hopeful that Creative will release a driver patch that will address this.
• The bastid is LOUD!. And I mean loud!!!. This is due to the Termaltake cpu cooler I got. You can hear it in my basement, its that loud. As soon as I upgrade the cpu in 12-14 months, that cooler is out of there. Until then I will deal
• My memory settings are pretty conservative at this point. In theory the machine is capable of using much more aggresive memory settings. I tried to play with them a little but sent the machine into no-post mode, so I backed them down. I’m not clear on what the issues are and the machine is blazing fast so for now I’m going to leave them be. At some point in the future I will be futzing with this so I can eke out another 2 fps in quake 😉
• I need more RAM. I bought 256 and should have sprung for 512, I can sense XP struggling occasionally. Meanwhile the price has gone up $14 since I bought my 256. I’ll get this in a few months, right now it’s fine.

So in the end, am I satisfied with a frustrating process that took me roughly 3 weeks to complete (not to mention almost 5 months of planning and waiting for the kt266a chipset to finally appear on an ABIT board)…in a nutshell, yeah, I’m glad I didn’t buy the Dell. My machine would kick the dell’s ass without breaking a sweat, and I paid roughly a third of what I would have for a slower machine from Dell. So satisfied in fact that I’m already planning the next project. I haven’t decided exactly what it will be yet – I might build a smoothwall router if I can get it to handle wireless traffic. Or I might go for a PVR (personal video recorder)/mp3/house server project inside one of Soldam’s georgous cases. Or maybe something else, I met a guy who built a machine into an old arcade cabinet so he could run all the old arcade games inside of M.A.M.E. and that appeals to me as well. So who knows, I’ll be sure to report on it here when I get it going.

Oh, and I have to rebuild the old box for my brother so he can do some 3d rendering/game playing. And it’s already being a b*&ch. Figures 😉