Memoirs of a Computer Build - Oi!

Published by Nick Ladd | Filed under Computer Workstation

Warning: I’m a computer nerd and thus sometimes write posts that may only appeal to my comrades in nerdism. If this is not you, please ignore this post.

I posted Friday about the new graphics beast that I am putting together to compliment my new Nikon D200. All of the components came as planned and very well shipped from newegg.com on Friday afternoon, so the build commenced that evening after work. I was in Portland, Oregon pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday (I live in Seattle), so I was hoping to get the build done in it’s entirety Friday night…guess I should have know better.

Review of Computer Specs:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz LGA 775
• Motherboard: MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX Intel
• RAM: 3GB DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 (Max under 32 bit XP)
• Graphics: EVGA GeForce 7950GT 512MB GDDR3
• Hard drive: (3) SAMSUNG 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s setup in a RAID 5 array (mobo has a built in Raid 5 controller)
• I/O Devices: Floppy Drive, DVDRW Drive, CompactFlash Card Reader (USB 2.0)
• Monitor: SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22″ 2 ms (GTG) DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor

Friday Night:

1. Install all Hardware into Case
   This was pretty straight forward due to some very nice poster size graphics provided by the motherboard manufacturer. Only problem to speak of with the physical motherboard layout is that the SATA ports were too close to the HD area in the case making it difficult to run the cables between HD’s and motherboard. I had some nifty anti-static gloves to help prevent me from frying sensitive electrical components…don’t know if they were a gimmic or not, but I suppose the only way to know is if I would have fried something…this didn’t happen.
2. Setup Motherboard Bios
   At boot I went into the system bios. First I set the bios so that the on-board RAID controller would be active. Next, I went into the memory area and set the clock speeds and voltages to the specs provided by the memory provider. They have an ‘auto’ setting for this, but I don’t really trust it.
3. Setup RAID Controller Bios
   Once the motherboard was setup to do RAID, the computer loads the RAID bios at boot. This setup was pretty simple, basically walking me through setting up the 3 hard drives I’ve installed into a single RAID 5 array. There are tons of websites that will explain a RAID 5 array to you, but in a nutshell it makes the 3 disks I installed behave like a single disc. At any given moment, two of the drives within the array contain a complete set of data. This means that in the case of a single hard drive failure, I would be able to recover the system without losing anything.
4. Install Windows
   This is where the problems began. First off, Windows XP doesn’t inherently recognize SATA hard drives. When you start the install you are given the option to load controller drivers by pressing F6. Off course, my motherboard didn’t come with a floppy that contained these suckers (strike one), so I had to first track them down online and then build a floppy disk with them.

   Once the disk was made, I repeatedly tried to load the drivers, but it seemed to not recognize them. Finally it dawned on me that the real problem was not the disk, but the floppy disk drive. It is pretty common to install a floppy drive cable upside-down, so I went back into the case and tried every possible combination with the new cable that came with my motherboard, only to still have it not work. I finally pulled out an old floppy drive cable from my spare parts box and bingo!, worked without error. Turns out the floppy drive cable that came with the motherboard was no good (strike two).

   Once I got the controller drivers successfully installed via the replaced floppy drive cable, it was now time for Windows to setup the hard drive partitions and format the one Windows would be installed on. I went through this process, allocating 150 GB of the RAID array as a ’system’ partition. The partitions seemed to get built without problem, but every time the formating started the screen would freeze and I’d be forced to reboot. Upon reboot the RAID bios would tell me my array was damaged. I would then rebuild the array and restart the install process. I went through this about 4 times before finally deciding to call it a night. It was about 3am, and the prospect of driving to Portland the next day at 10am had to take precedence.

Sunday Night:

Flash forward to Sunday evening. I had a very nice time in Portland (unfortunately no photos since my camera has yet to arrive) but it was time to get back down to business. I thought about the computer quite a bit over the weekend and finally decided it must be a hardware issue. Eventually I noticed that every time the array failed, it was consistently the same drive that kept going down. Rather than pull out the drive, I figured I’d swap out the SATA cable first. I did this, and then was able to format the disk partition without it freezing. At this point I was pretty livid since I had already gone through one bad cable from the motherboard manufacturer only to have another fail (strike three).

At this point the Window install went pretty smoothly. I got the OS running, ran Windows Update, installed the latest drivers for all my hardware, setup the network, installed software, and basically had my workstation running smoothly. It started to get late, so I figured I would then take the remaining space on the hard drive array (about 800 GB) and create the ‘data’ partition and format it, and then go to sleep.

This is where the proverbial shit really hit the fan (as if it hadn’t already). The partition was created without error, but about 10% into the format my Nvidia RAID array software in Windows told me that one of the array drives was down. The array software started freakin’ and the whole thing locked up. I rebooted, and went into the RAID bios which started telling me that instead of the single array I created, I now had 3 different ones, and that they were all corrupt. It couldn’t be rebuilt because the single array I had created was completely gone. By now, it was about 2am (Sunday night). I left the machine there and went to sleep (knowing that I’d be worthless the next day at work without a little shut eye). After an evening of installing and thinking that the computer would work I was back to square one.

Monday AM:

I woke up this morning at 6am (basically still dreaming about the build) and restarted the Windows install process. I was able to get XP back on the computer before I left to work.

First thing once I get home from work will be to boot into Windows Recovery Mode (basically old school DOS) and try to format the partition that previously failed from outside of Windows. If this fails, I’m going to to go Fry’s and buy new SATA cables just in case one of the other ones provided by my mobo manufacturer is also bad. Hopefully all will work nicely and by the end of this evening I’ll have a usable machine…chances are it’ll be another late night.