Installing your Hard Drive, CD-ROM Drive, and Floppy Drive
Installing your IDE and Floppy drives is the next operation you will need to take part in. There are two different ways to install these drives, and which one you use will depend on your case. If you are using an old or inexpensive case, you may have to fasten the drives directly to the case using screws. However, if you are using a case such as the 6890A, you will be able to use standard drive rails to attach the drives. Simply screw the rails to the drive (make sure you leave enough headroom for the external drives so you don't have to reach into the case to insert a disk) and slide the rails into the case. Depending on the rails you have, you may or may not have to fasten the rails using screws.
Now it's time to plug them in. Start off with the power cables. Idealy, each drive should have its own line straight to the power supply, but that isn't realistic for most people. If you do have to share, here's the best way to go - let the CD-ROM and Floppy drive share the same power cord and let the hard drive have its own cable. Oh, and make sure you leave one of the cables for any fans you need to plug into the power supply - they create a large amount of electrical noise and shouldn't be daisy-chained onto your drives. If you have two hard drives, you can use the same source cable for those, as they don't create any electrical interference that could disrupt operation.
Next, you need to plug in your floppy and IDE cables. The floppy drive needs to be plugged into the end of its cable, and you should follow the same plan with your IDE cables, particularly if you intend on installing a secondary slave later on - the slave drive creates interference if it is plugged on the end of the cable because it is always "fighting" for bandwidth. Now that those cables are plugged in, connect your analog I/O cable to your CD-ROM drive and sound card. If you would like more information on installing IDE drives, check out our Hard Drive installation guide and our Optical Drive installation guide.
Booting Up for the First Time
Before closing up your case, do the following:
- Make sure you've plugged in all your fans
- Check all of your cable connections
- Push down on your add-in cards and RAM modules to make sure they are seated properly
Now you're ready for prime time. Close up your case, plug in your monitor, keyboard, and mouse (you can get the other stuff later), attach the power cable, and power up. If all goes well, you should hear a beep and the BIOS loading screen should pop up. You need to enter your BIOS setup screen (on most computers, you do this by hitting the DEL key). In there, you need to do two things: (a) make sure that the IDE autodetect feature detects your hard drive[s] (and for best results, assign the detected drive in the BIOS so it won't have to detect every drive upon rebooting), and (b) make sure your processor is set to the right speed. If both are all right, skip on down to the BIOS configuration section.
Troubleshooting Common Bootup Problems
What do you do if you can't get your computer to POST (power-on-self-test), or it doesn't detect your hard drives, you should check the following things before calling the respective company's tech support lines:
- Listen for the beep code when you hit the power button. You can use this to determine which part of the computer is causing the problem. If your computer didn't come with the listing of the beep codes for its particular BIOS, you should be able to download them from the net. If you aren't getting a beep, either the speaker isn't plugged in correctly to the motherboard or you've got a dead board that will need to be replaced.
- If you can determine from the beep code what is causing the problem (be it the CPU, the RAM, or whatever) go back into the computer and make sure the connection for that piece is solid. You may need to reset the part using more force than you did originally. RAM slots on extremely cheap or generic motherboards are notorious for needing a lot of force to make a connection.
- If your hard drives aren't being detected properly, make sure that the jumpers are set properly and that the IDE cables are fit snugly into their ports. Also, if you aren't hearing the drive spin up when you hit the power button, check and see if the power cable is properly connected to the drive.
- If the light on your floppy drive won't turn off within a few seconds of boot up, you've got the floppy cable upside down (don't worry, it happens to everyone sometimes). Just go back and flip it over, and it'll work fine.
Configuring the BIOS
If you're here, you should already be inside your BIOS and have made sure everything is working properly. Here are a couple of settings you will want to play around with before installing Windows:
- Unless you are in Japan, turn off Mode 3 Floppy drive support
- Turn on Quickboot/quickpost/etc.
- Disable Boot up floppy seek
For more in-depth coverage of the BIOS, check out our article on the subject here.
Installing Windows
To install Windows, first you will need to boot the system into DOS. To do this, take your boot disk, insert it in your floppy drive, and reboot the computer. This should work unless you disabled the floppy drive on your computer in the BIOS - if you did that, go back and re-enable it.
If you got a retail full version of Windows 98, it should have come with a boot disk. If, for some reason, you lost it or something, any boot disk with a working CD driver on it should work (like the standard Win98 Emergency Startup Disk). This means you should have access to your floppy drive and your CD-ROM drive after boot. Most likely, however, your hard drive isn't formatted yet, so we'll have to deal with that next.
Before you format your hard disk, you need to partition it. And unless you own a copy of partition magic or another such program, you are stuck with old, archaic Fdisk. At the A: prompt, type in Fdisk to go into the program. Create a primary partition (your C drive) using fdisk and then restart the computer. Afterwards, you will once again need to reboot. Once you have rebooted the computer, type format C: /s (the /s makes the drive bootable) at the A: prompt and go do something else for about half an hour while it formats. When it is done, we recommend copying the Windows "cab" files (located in the \Win98 directory on the CD) onto the hard drive. This will make the installation faster.
So now that your disk is partitioned and formatted, reboot your computer once more. If you haven't copied the Windows cab files on the CD over to the hard drive, you'll need the boot disk and the Windows CD in their respective drives. You have to run setup.exe. You do this by going to your CD drive (typically d:\) and then typing in setup, or if you copied over the cab files, go into the folder you created on your hard drive (\win98?) and type setup. Go through the Windows installation program as normal. If you want more information on this subject, check out the Installing / Reinstalling Win9x guide and the Dual Boot guide.
Troubleshooting a Failed Installation
What should you do if you can't finish the installation because the program keeps crashing? Just like Windows, huh? Well, believe it or not, they did do a decent job on the installer - but it does stress your computer's components. This means that if you've got a bad or improperly installed part, things aren't going to work. Here are a few things to check before you go running back to the store with your computer in hand screaming, "You sold me a bad part!"
- Make sure the CAS rating in the BIOS is the right one for the ram. Most of the time, you will want it set to 3, unless you specifically bought CAS-2 ram.
- Make sure all of your components are plugged in firmly (push down on them)
- Check all of your cables again
- If you are using a slotkey in your system, make sure it is inserted properly - sometimes, particularly with the older models, it doesn't always make full connection with the motherboard.
Windows Setup
Once Windows is installed and you boot up into it for the first time, it is going to request that you feed it a bunch of drivers and the like, so make sure you have them on hand. After that's done and you are at your desktop, first check your My Computer folder and make sure that all of your drives and partitions show up. Then go into the Control Panel and use the System applet's Device Manager to make sure your sound card, video card, etc. are installed properly. If some of the parts are only being shown using generic drivers, you will need to change them - which you can do right from within the applet.
If there are any conflicts within your computer, they will be marked with a yellow exclamation mark or a red X. You may have some IRQ or memory access conflicts. You should be able to fix them from within the Device Manager - but if you can't, go back through and move one of the offending cards to another slot on the motherboard and see if that helps solve the conflict.
If certain parts aren't showing up at all, first go to the Add New Hardware applet and have the computer search for new components - if it doesn't find the part(s) that are missing, turn the computer off and try resetting the pieces of hardware that are causing problems.
System Cooling
Adequate cooling of your computer is important whether or not you plan on overclocking your system. You should at the very least have some kind of exhaust fan on your computer other than your processor and power supply fans. Beyond that, the extent you go to is up to you - but if you want to overclock, make sure you have some serious cooling - otherwise you could damage your processor.
Overclocking
If you are considering overclocking your computer, make sure you read up about it in my Overclocking How to guide (Part 1; Part 2). Let me caution you, however, run your computer at its normal speed for the first couple of days after building it to make sure it is completely stable. If it already isn't stable (meaning there is a problem with some piece of hardware) you could just exacerbate the problem, and you would have ruined any warranty you had on the parts as well. If you are really concerned about it, you might consider doing some kind of burn in on your system. Burning in the system is similar to the testing process done on overclocked processors - set a system intensive game into demo loop mode (Unreal works well) and leave it sitting for a while... if it doesn't crash, you're cool.
Conclusion
Whew... well, there you have it, the mother of the grandmother of the aunt of the daughter of the mother of all computer-building guides. Hope you liked it - and as always, feel free to e-mail me with your questions and comments.
