![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
So... all my parts have arrived, I'm finally ready to build up my awesome new system with a nice BFG 7800GTX and 2GB of RAM and all that jazz.
Get it all plugged in, switch on the power supply, hit the power button, system makes a little buzz like it's turning on, and then doesn't. Hmm.... I wonder what the deal is? I figured out I had the PCI-E power cable plugged in the wrong way. I had the side that goes into the vid card plugged into my PSU (it's a modular system), and vice versa. Apparantly the keying on the plugs is not good enough to actually prevent you from doing that. Fortunately, this isn't cause for concern, nothing was broken. I flip it around, and viola, system starts humming to life.
Everything seems like it's working well. I set windows setup to start formatting my new 250GB drive which takes upwards of 90 mins. I go through the rest of the setup and get into windows eventually, flawless install. I had to do a bit more driver installation for my devices than I'm used to with older computers, but this all goes very smoothly. I'm pretty happy at this point, as things are going well.
So, now it's time to plug in my 2 old hard drives into the system to start pulling data off of them (I'm keeping one in the system permanently too). The 30GB drive is detected, but not my 80GB (the one I'll keep). I'm wondering what the issue is but I figure something just isn't plugged in right or something. In the meantime, I copy off all the important data from the 30GB drive to my C drive, destroy it's partition, and shut down. I pulled it out and set it aside, it's going back in my old system which is going to be sold. I still can't seem to get my 80GB drive to even get detected by the BIOS... I don't konw what the deal is.
I finally figure out that the end plug on the IDE cable just doesn't work, but the second one does. This forces the drive to be "slave" and windows doesn't see it. I guess windows doesn't like a slave drive with no master on the channel. At least, that's what I figured at the time, it's entirely possible it wasn't being seen for reasons I was going to discover later.
So I pull out the nice shiny new black IDE cable that doesn't work right, and reluctantly use an older plain grey cable. Bam, problem solved. Windows sees the drive but... what is this? 74.5GB unpartitioned space? Huh? It had a full blown primary partition on it? What gives?!
My drive is screwed up... I try to use the windows recovery console to see what I can do with it but it seems hopless from there. A friend recommends trying a program called R-Studio (www.r-tt.com) to see what I can do. I get the demo which has full functionality but won't restore files larger than 64 kB. This obviously won't solve my problem but at least I'll see if I can recover something.
Bottom line, I love this program. It scanned my drive (which took awhile) and found everything, including 5 other partitions (2 FAT16, 2FAT32, and a Ext2FS that apparantly had a size of 21.4 terabytes, so yeah, I guess you can say the partition table was wonky). Right now I'm making an image of the data on the drive so I can wipe the drive out and actually start using it. I'll get myself the full version of R-Studio later so I can start recovering the data off the image. I did a test with some small files and it recovered them perfectly.
It seems I'm cursed when it comes to building a new system. It seems nothing can ever go perfectly for me, something always has to go wrong. At least in this case I'm able to rectify the situation well enough. I had a chance to install Doom3 and timedemo it and on ultra quality with 4xAA and 8xAS at 1152x864 got 52ish FPS, without overclocking. I'm pretty happy with it so far, and all crises have been averted (or are in the process of being so) it seems.
Nothing ever goes perfectly... but I guess I'd be somewhat disappointed if it did, because... well... where's the challenge in a flawless setup? hehehehe
Get it all plugged in, switch on the power supply, hit the power button, system makes a little buzz like it's turning on, and then doesn't. Hmm.... I wonder what the deal is? I figured out I had the PCI-E power cable plugged in the wrong way. I had the side that goes into the vid card plugged into my PSU (it's a modular system), and vice versa. Apparantly the keying on the plugs is not good enough to actually prevent you from doing that. Fortunately, this isn't cause for concern, nothing was broken. I flip it around, and viola, system starts humming to life.
Everything seems like it's working well. I set windows setup to start formatting my new 250GB drive which takes upwards of 90 mins. I go through the rest of the setup and get into windows eventually, flawless install. I had to do a bit more driver installation for my devices than I'm used to with older computers, but this all goes very smoothly. I'm pretty happy at this point, as things are going well.
So, now it's time to plug in my 2 old hard drives into the system to start pulling data off of them (I'm keeping one in the system permanently too). The 30GB drive is detected, but not my 80GB (the one I'll keep). I'm wondering what the issue is but I figure something just isn't plugged in right or something. In the meantime, I copy off all the important data from the 30GB drive to my C drive, destroy it's partition, and shut down. I pulled it out and set it aside, it's going back in my old system which is going to be sold. I still can't seem to get my 80GB drive to even get detected by the BIOS... I don't konw what the deal is.
I finally figure out that the end plug on the IDE cable just doesn't work, but the second one does. This forces the drive to be "slave" and windows doesn't see it. I guess windows doesn't like a slave drive with no master on the channel. At least, that's what I figured at the time, it's entirely possible it wasn't being seen for reasons I was going to discover later.
So I pull out the nice shiny new black IDE cable that doesn't work right, and reluctantly use an older plain grey cable. Bam, problem solved. Windows sees the drive but... what is this? 74.5GB unpartitioned space? Huh? It had a full blown primary partition on it? What gives?!
My drive is screwed up... I try to use the windows recovery console to see what I can do with it but it seems hopless from there. A friend recommends trying a program called R-Studio (www.r-tt.com) to see what I can do. I get the demo which has full functionality but won't restore files larger than 64 kB. This obviously won't solve my problem but at least I'll see if I can recover something.
Bottom line, I love this program. It scanned my drive (which took awhile) and found everything, including 5 other partitions (2 FAT16, 2FAT32, and a Ext2FS that apparantly had a size of 21.4 terabytes, so yeah, I guess you can say the partition table was wonky). Right now I'm making an image of the data on the drive so I can wipe the drive out and actually start using it. I'll get myself the full version of R-Studio later so I can start recovering the data off the image. I did a test with some small files and it recovered them perfectly.
It seems I'm cursed when it comes to building a new system. It seems nothing can ever go perfectly for me, something always has to go wrong. At least in this case I'm able to rectify the situation well enough. I had a chance to install Doom3 and timedemo it and on ultra quality with 4xAA and 8xAS at 1152x864 got 52ish FPS, without overclocking. I'm pretty happy with it so far, and all crises have been averted (or are in the process of being so) it seems.
Nothing ever goes perfectly... but I guess I'd be somewhat disappointed if it did, because... well... where's the challenge in a flawless setup? hehehehe