Yet another Computer to add to the family

[Andy]

There are 3 of us at home and today I built our 5th computer  It was necessary since my son has quit school and the only thing he can do is code games (very well I might add) so I want to give him every chance of success. So we needed a game server.

The other pc's are are a 64bit AMD unit being used instead of a TV/Video/DVD LOL
A mini-ITX for my wife to send email and post to her forum.
My laptop.
The son's gaming PC

So it can be suprising how many computers a family needs these days.

The server has a 14" monitor that cost $10 and the CPU is an Intel D805 dual core since we only need processing power for multi-player games. It was quite interesting assembling the CPU. It uses a bed of pins on the motherboard that spike into an array of pads below the CPU chip that gets held down by a clamp. Then there is a huge heatsink/fan assembly that squats down on top of it with some fiddly plastic clamps at the 4 corners.

The case I used was really user-friendly with hinged drive bays and quick release clamps to hold things in place.

It used to be a joke how many computers I had since I started collecting old ones such as Sinclair, Atari, Mac, IBM etc. I threw some away but I still have some of these in storage so in reality I probably own at least 10 computers 

[Andy]

The new computer didn't work. We couldn't install windows to the Hard Disk.

It was a SATA (Serial ATA) type. After a surf around the web I found lot's of people have similar problems. The first version of windows XP was produced before SATA so you need to install drivers from a floppy disk. I don't have a floppy disk and refuse to get one. But we were using XP with service pack 2 on a DVD which is supposed to be compatible. Anyway, after most of the drivers have been loaded into RAM from the DVD it crashes with a familiar blue screen of death with the helpful sytem stopped message to protect the system from damage.

So I took the system back to the store and they thought the hard disk was faulty from new so we left it with them. So it will be interesting to report back how it gets fixed. They had it all day today but no phone call yet.

Of course we played around with bios settings and even tried the hard disk in my other PC that uses SATA disks with the same error.

These days I don't like to buy parts to make a computer online unless they are individual parts. If you are building a system and it doesn't work, at least you can take the system unit back to the shop if you bought the bits locally. Then if it's a stupid mistake by you, you pay some labour charge. Or if it's a faulty part from them, they should change it. But getting a pile of bits through the mail and trying to sort out the problem must be a nightmare I think.

[SensoVision]

Congratulation, Andy with your new PC!
Our family currently have two PCs one running Debian Linux and server as my desktop, TV, DVD, video recorder, workplace, http server, router, firewall and DNS server it's running 24/7 and very quiet after I've changed all compontnets to low noise ones.(it's also AMD64 powered).

The other is laptop belongs to my girlfriend and have Windows XP and Debian(she just start learning Linux).

BTW Andy, I wonder why have you choose Intel based server?

It uses a bed of pins on the motherboard that spike into an array of pads below the CPU chip that gets held down by a clamp. Then there is a huge heatsink/fan assembly that squats down on top of it with some fiddly plastic clamps at the 4 corners.

do you have picture of it maybe?

[SensoVision]

it's sad to hear about your problem, I know that installing Windows on SATA is a pain... especially if your motherboard have built-in RAID controller with which you have to use floppy even with SP2...
Gladly Linux installing on SATA drives without such stupid things at least I didn't have any problems with SATA yet, I would say it's a bit less problematic than IDE on some motherboards.

Hope your PC would be fixed soon!

[Andy]

Yes the motherboard has a raid controller but it is turned off in the bios. But I leave it to the shop to sort out. They are building systems everyday and if people take the hardware back, the message will hopefully feed back to the problem companies. But I suspect MS don't care at all about helping people building PC's at home.

p.s. I forgot that I did boot up Linux on a DVD to check the system was basically OK. We have to run Windows on it though since it's a Battlefield mod game server.

p.p.s. I don't understand how SATA drives can have a driver added to them before an operating system is installed. The DVD should simply detect the drive and format it. Then the software is written to the disk. Or is that far too simple  So if the DVD does not contain the required software there must be a hack disk available somewhere to make SATA disks visible to windows XP. It's crazy to have to connect a floppy drive with cable etc. that you don't want. Anyway our hard disk doesn't have any drivers to download an install from a floppy available LOL. The support site says it should just work.

[SensoVision]

It's crazy to have to connect a floppy drive with cable etc. that you don't want

I think that MS could at least make it's possible to use USB drives instead of floppy as they are more common now...

[Andy]

It turns out that the hard disk was faulty. After the computer shop replaced the hard disk it was easy to install XP from a DVD drive.

[SensoVision]

glad to hear that your problem was solved like this. Hope you'll make up and running soon!

[Andy]

Thanks Denis 

I was going to post the solution for the many other people online that seem to have problems with SATA drives  but in our case it seems like it was simply a faulty drive from the start.

The key thing to remember is that windows XP before SP2 needed drivers loaded from floppy disk to recognise SATA hard disks but XP service pack 2 doesn't. If you plug your DVD into the 2nd IDE slot and the SATA drive to the 1st SATA drive connection then it should work OK.