Today, I had to build a computer for delivery on Tuesday for a very good customer of mine. He really likes using zip drives, so I offered to move his existing Zip 250 into his new computer. I was ripping the old computer apart anyway to copy the old hard drive onto a partition in the new computer, so it really took no appreciable effort to do so – or so I thought.
<digression>The old computer inexplicably started locking up without warning. The only way to bring it back to life was to let it sit for a while. My first thought was that one of the fans was dead or dying and the problem was heat related. I booted the system into the CMOS to look at the hardware monitor. The CPU fan was moving along at a steady 3042 rpm and the CPU maintained a constant temperature of 46-49C. So much for my heat theory. While I was in there, I also noted that the voltages coming off the power supply were right in line with what I expected and rock steady.
I went ahead and booted the system into windows figuring there might be a corrupted swap file or garbage in the temp directory. Both of those circumstances have occurred for me in the past, so I thought I’d start there. I deleted the temp files and jumped into a command prompt to look for spyware and viruses in the windows and system32 folders when the computer locked up on me without warning. The keyboard was completely dead. I couldn’t even get an LED toggle on the numlock key. The old three finger salute was unavailable as well. My only recourse was to hold the power button down for the requisite four seconds or use the reset key. I tried both. Even though the screen blanked, nothing ever came back.
So… scratch the “blame windows” theory. Clearly, I was dealing with a hardware issue. Now this particular customer doesn’t like a lot of downtime and trial and error. Given that there were no obvious symptoms that led me to any specific component, I gave him the option of either allowing me to troubleshoot the problem by swapping components until we found the culprit or allowing me to cut to the chase and just replace the motherboard, CPU, RAM and power supply. I hate tossing out good parts like that, but for the price of hardware, it’s often cheaper to just go ahead with what amounts to a partial upgrade.
It turns out, this fellow had even less of a tolerance for partial solutions than I expected and he requested I just replace the entire computer. It allowed him to move up to Windows XP from 2000 and taking the time to do a clean install of his software was something he had been planning for me to do anyway.</digression>
Fast forward to this evening. I’ve assembled the new computer, moved the zip drive over and I have to say, I’m quite pleased with the new setup. Here’s what I put in:
- AOpen QF50 Midtower Enclosure
- Gigabyte GA-8I945P Motherboard
- Pentium 4 3.4 GHz with the LGA775 socket form factor
- A gig of RAM
- AGP 8x GeForce 4 video
- 250 GB Maxtor SATA Hard Disk
- DVD-/+RW
- 52x CD-RW
All in all, a decent system. I loaded Windows XP Professional, installed Norton Antivirus and then realized the onboard gigabit LAN adapter wasn’t active because the driver wasn’t native. I inserted Gigabyte’s driver CD to activate and install the motherboard drivers. Gigabyte has a pretty nifty solution. You pick all the drivers you want/need from the initial splash screen and it installs them all, even if it needs to reboot in the middle, without any further user intervention. I went ahead and selected all four drivers (Intel chipset, USB 2.0, Marvell Gigabit LAN, and audio) and set it loose. The downside of their nifty driver is that it doesn’t really tell you what it’s doing. Basically, there is a little red line near the bottom left that serves as a progress indicator. For some reason, it stalled somewhere between 10 and 15 percent and refused to budge. I cancelled the install tried restarting it but had no further luck.
After rebooting, the driver installation automatically restarted but it remained stuck in the same place. I tried a few things, including going into the CD-ROM and installing the drivers one at a time, but I couldn’t get the one I really needed without their installer. Windows claimed the .INF file for the gigabit LAN adapter was in an ‘unexpected format’ – whatever that means.
I decided to explore the hard drive to see if cleaning temp files might help unstick the installer (can you tell I loathe stray temp files?). What I found was that windows had arbitrarily assigned the zip drive to use letter C and the hard drive I was booting from was assigned Drive letter F. Priority interrupt! I went into disk manager and moved the zip drive over to drive G and then discovered that Windows will not allow you to reletter the partition you booted from.
It looked like I was going to be stuck with Drive F as my boot drive. Now, my brain started imagining the various circumstances I should expect to begin dealing with when things go wrong on this system. Not to mention my existing problem installing drivers. I decided to repartition the hard drive and reinstall windows. This time, I would do it without the zip drive connected thereby avoiding the problem.
I booted the system back up using the XP Pro CD, deleted the existing partition and recreated it for a fresh installation. After 40 minutes of watching Windows Installer do its thing without an IDE zip drive to confuse it, Windows did indeed assign letter C to my hard disk. Furthermore, the motherboard driver installation went beautifully and completed in under five minutes sailing in blissful ignorance past the formerly troublesome spot.
Since I had the system up and it looked stable, I went ahead and ran the activation sequence for Windows. This turned out to be a mistake. On my next reboot, I reconnected the zip drive before powering the system back up. At this point, Windows decided to inform me that I’ve made “substantial changes” to my operating hardware and I would have to redo the activation. Grrr!
Beyond that, the rest of the job went smoothly. I installed a bevy of applications and utilities and copied the contents of the old hard drive over to the new system and life is now good. I’ll deliver it on Tuesday and can now enjoy my Labor Day weekend.