I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it yet, I’d be surprised if I have, but I built a new PC this past weekend. It wasn’t necessarily out of desire alone that I built this new PC, but more a combination of both desire and necessity. I had a bit of a problem with my old desktop system I built some number of years ago. Over the past few months I’ve noticed every once and a while the system looses the ability to communicate with the connected second hard drive. This results in a lot of event log system errors. It really got bad when I came home to find my system not responding to remote desktop connections (I don’t bother with connecting peripherals to it any longer), and was generally unresponsive. Come to find out when I did hook a monitor to it that it was complaining about not being able to find the boot sector.
That was it, luckily it was Friday, so I marched down to Microcenter with the intent to at least pick up a new hard drive somewhere in the 500 gig range to cover the 500+ gigs being stored currently on the backup desktop going non-responsive.
So I get to Microcenter, by myself, which is a bad idea, and I start wandering around. I find they’re having a mothers day sale in all the components that one could build a sweet machine with. So I’m standing around now contemplating whether to just build a new backup PC. I decide to give my old PC the benefit of the doubt and that it could be a faulty IDE cable since I hear no hard drive clacking, no obvsious signs of failure, but I don’t decide to temp my luck. I find they’re having a sales on WD Cavalier 500 gig drives for 99$ out the door. I decide to pick up the SATA drive for the new PC, and I see they’ve also got RAM on sale for 30$ for 2gig pack of 1 gig strips DD2 6400. So I go ahead and pick that up as well. I pick up some new IDE 133 cables for the old machine and I head on my way. Total price was 220$ out the door with the mail-in rebate being the only pain for the RAM.
I get home then tear into the old machine. Move the drive to give room for the new non stretchy cables. I also decide while I’m doing it that I’d might as well swap out the IDE cables for the CD-Rom drives too. So I get the old machine cables all hooked up nice and turn the machine on. It boots just fine. Get to the deskop, check ‘my computer,’ and sure enough my two drives are showing up. Computer management gives the drives a ‘healthy’ state and I’m happy with that.
I then turn my attention to the new computer XPS 720. I open it for the first time and behold the glory that is a well designed, easy to work inside, and it was very pretty to say the least. I pop in my two new sticks of RAM, and slide the hard drive into it’s new slot. Turns out the PC can take 6 hard drives or a maximum of 2.45TB of drive space.
I turn the XPS machine on. That’s when things started to get bad. The drive shows up as finding new hardware. It sits, and sits, and then sits some more. I check ‘my computer’ to find only the normal C drive and the stupid backup partition. I check device manager and see the new drive. Ok, things should be showing up as a new driver. In the drive instructions, in the XPS manual, and on the net everyone agrees it should show up. So I restart the PC into bios. I check the SATA controller to find the new hard drive is not on the SATA device listing. At this point I get frustrated. I start poking around the configurations, doing diagnostics, and checking again to make sure the cables were ok. Vista sees the drive in device manager but I have no connectivity to it. I finally do a harddrive diagnostic and baam Bios now sees and says that it now controls the drive. Happy days are here again. I boot back up and still find Vista not displaying the drive. Frustration! I even go so far as to setup the Dell support center mal-ware help. It gets into my system and starts asking for permission to connect Dell to my PC. No way jose!
Long story short with several long hours later on the phone with Dell I do my own thing with disk management to reformat the drive that took hours in itself. It was a long frustrating ordeal because the drive did not come formatted my bios was out of date version A03 compared to version A06 that was available. Dell didn’t know why SATA controller did not pick up the drive, even though this was listed as a problem in the XPS 600 series in on-line forums. The help was great. Bapi seemed very helpful and was a pleasure to work with. Both of us admitted without Google neither one of us would be very good at our jobs. Go figure. It was still pretty amusing. So while the drive was formatting I played some GTA 4, and chatted with Bapi about where to go from there. All in all a decent exchange, but still very frustrating the hardware caused me that headache. Formatting 500 gigs takes forever to accomplish.
Anyway, I’ll have to mention more about the new PC in part 2 of this blog. I will give you this detail. The new PC’s name is BlackNinja and it’s very fitting. Till then stay tuned for more specs and reviews of BlackNinja and his Fedora glory.
Computer Hardware