As posted on another section of the forum, I'm planning to combine pieces of my Packard Bell and other old PC into a new case and motherboard for a fresh custom built PC.
Having read reviews of mobo's and a few comments on other forums there's a couple of issues I'd like some advice on...
The primary HDD for the new machine will be the 400Gb SATA drive ex the PB (there's a couple of older IDE drives from my other PC I would like to add too). Now the PB already has PB's bastardised version of Win XP installed, along with the "restore" partition. I take it I would be best off Fdisking this HD in the PB with my own Win XP disc before matching it to the new mobo?
The other area of confusion regards getting the new mobo to recognise the SATA drive. I'm looking at either the ABit IB9 or Gigabyte equivalent and user feedback on both boards is that you can run into problems on the first boot with XP - it can't find the HDD to install the operating system. Apparently you need to copy some files from the mobo CD to a floppy disc and use this in conjunction with the XP CD. Now I have got a floppy drive in my 4 year old Special Reserve PC (whether I've got any blank discs is another matter) but this seems a rather user unfriendly way of setting up a new build PC, given that the floppy is all but obsolete. And how do you manage on a PC without a floppy drive?
Sorry if the answer to this is blatantly obvious but this is the first time of trying to build my own PC and I want to eliminate any pitfalls well in advance of starting the project.
Having read reviews of mobo's and a few comments on other forums there's a couple of issues I'd like some advice on...
The primary HDD for the new machine will be the 400Gb SATA drive ex the PB (there's a couple of older IDE drives from my other PC I would like to add too). Now the PB already has PB's bastardised version of Win XP installed, along with the "restore" partition. I take it I would be best off Fdisking this HD in the PB with my own Win XP disc before matching it to the new mobo?
The other area of confusion regards getting the new mobo to recognise the SATA drive. I'm looking at either the ABit IB9 or Gigabyte equivalent and user feedback on both boards is that you can run into problems on the first boot with XP - it can't find the HDD to install the operating system. Apparently you need to copy some files from the mobo CD to a floppy disc and use this in conjunction with the XP CD. Now I have got a floppy drive in my 4 year old Special Reserve PC (whether I've got any blank discs is another matter) but this seems a rather user unfriendly way of setting up a new build PC, given that the floppy is all but obsolete. And how do you manage on a PC without a floppy drive?
Sorry if the answer to this is blatantly obvious but this is the first time of trying to build my own PC and I want to eliminate any pitfalls well in advance of starting the project.