Most of my parts are here now, but of course, things never go as smoothly as you’d like…
Cabling the power supply was a bit of a challenge, as it’s kept off in its own little chamber for extra cooling, but with a a fairly small hole that you have to thread all of the cables through in order to reach the rest of the system. There’s a also a fan really close to the power supply, so there’s not much room to bend the cables around.
The 8800 GTS is a fairly large video card, so things are pretty tight in the case even without multiple IDE ribbon cables everywhere. I had to take the middle 3.5″ drive bay out just to have a place for slack in the cables to rest, but I don’t need it right now anyway. The preferred place for drives in this case is actually in the lower chamber, where they’ll get cooled directly by the fan down there.
It detects the memory as PC2-5300 instead of the PC2-6400 it really is, but that’s easily solved by fiddling with the BIOS settings. The motherboard automatically bumps the speed down in certain cases for stability, but it still passes the stress tests (so far) after correcting it.
The biggest problems though, were related to migrating over the old hard drive. Using the Sysprep tool didn’t work as well as expected, as I only got a BSOD upon trying to boot the drive. I figured I’d just do a repair install from the original XP CD, as that has worked for others, but then the system had trouble seeing the hard drive at all. Each time it booted, it would often fail to detect that the drive was there, hang for a long time trying to detect drives, or freeze partway through the boot.
I fiddled with all of the numerous IDE settings in the BIOS, tried different cables and power connections, and flashed the BIOS, but nothing seemed to help until I moved it to a different SATA port, and then it was able to reliably see the drive and I could carry out the repair install. I’m still not sure whether it was just a bad cable connection (the SATA ports are a bit hard to reach with the video card nearby) or if I have a faulty SATA port or what — hopefully not the latter, though with five SATA ports it’s not too big a deal if one of them is dead.
Once repaired, XP would boot successfully, but it wanted to force me to reauthorize the XP key before it would even let me log in. The only problem with that is that the network drivers weren’t installed yet, it wasn’t even giving me a chance to install them, and the driver installer failed to run under Safe Mode. I dug out an old network card that already had drivers installed, used that, and was finally able to log in.
All of the old files and programs are still there, though doing the repair install has confused a few of them — AVG complains about an invalid/unknown license, for example, so it’ll have to be reinstalled. I still have some drivers to install and minor things to fix up, but for now I’m just running stress tests (Memtest86 overnight, and Prime95 while at work) to ensure that the system is stable.
And I still have the other two systems to go. Now I remember why I only do this every three or four years…