Build your own PC

4. Fit it all together - page 5 of 5

Finally plug in the monitor and your system should boot up, though of course it won't go any further than a bios information screen. If it doesn't then the most likely cause is that your video card is not correctly inserted. It could of course be faulty but you will find that hardware faults are much rarer than most people will have you believe. When I find something not working I ask myself "what might I have done wrong" and try a good number of things before I even begin to wonder if the hardware is faulty.

With a booting system you can then connect the power and data cables to the floppy drive (remembering the golden rule of red stripe to pin 1). The other thing to remember with floppy drives is that the plain end goes to the motherboard, the end with the twisted cable goes to drive A (or the one and only floppy) and the middle one goes to drive B - a second floppy should you decide to fit one (most people of course don't fit a second floppy as these days it virtually no advantage.) As a check to make sure the cable is the correct way round you will find that if it is the wrong way around then the floppy light witll stay on permanently when the system is switched on.

Next fit the power and data cables to the hard drive ONLY. If you are using UDMA 66 cable then unless your cable is marked specifically Different you will find that the blue is at one end and goes to the motherboard, the other end (nomally black) goes to the main hard drive as master, the middle is normally slave. This is unfortunate for those of us who want to fit a cd as slave on the same cable as it is difficult to get the cable to reach correctly since the cd is normally posittioned in one of the 5 1/4" bays ABOVE the hard drive. There are 2 solutions to this. First you can use a second cable to connect the CD, or secondly you could use a 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 hard drive fitting rails to mount the hard drive above the CD. If you are lucky your case may just about let you fit the CD in the very bottom bay and the hard drive immediately below it and in this configuration the lead is often long enough to be made to fit.

Insert a keyboard to make configurations at the next stage and then start the system again. Wben the messeage "Hit DEL to enter setup appears then press the delete key and you will go into the BIOS Setup. You can then choose an option to autodetect hard drives and if you cabling is correct you should see you main hard drive as primary master. If it isn't then there are two possible causes.
1. Cabling is wrong :- you have the ide inserted into the secondary ide connector rather than the primary, or if you are using UDMA 66 then you either don't have the blue to the mainboard or your hard drive is not attached to the master connector.
2. The jumpering is wrong :- Diagrams on hard drives are often a little confusing and you can try different options to see which one works correctly..

After you have it correctly set then it is time to add the CD. If your system uses AWARD bios then the cd will not be detected by the Detect Hard drive settings is the bios but will be found on boot and displayed as a device on the POST screen. AMIBIOS generally speaking does detect and display CD/DVD on this bios option. (if the CD does not display correctly then you have similar optons for cabling/jumpering errors as you had with the hard drive.

At this point you can move on to loading windows. Don't worry if you still have have hardware such as soundcards left, you will find they cause fewer problems if you physically install them after you have fully loaded windows.

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