IMG_2642.JPG
And it boots (posts?). Obviously the disk fails to boot at the bottom, as I haven't installed anything on any of the disks yet. This was just the beginning of days of pain, however.
To get to this point, I had to find out that the outlet in the room here was dead (1/2 hr of fiddling to realize this). Then after finding a 3-prong extension cord, I had to figure out that the PSU wasn't turned on at the back (20 minutes). Then I learned I had all the little fiddly connections (HDD LED, reset, pwr, speaker, etc) backwards. It's too much to ask that these be polarized, or well documented. I read everything, and how I had them was the best way they made sense. It's no fair putting black crosses under some pins. Does that mean they're positive (+)? Maybe they're not pluses, but simply indicators (like 4 lines pointing to the pin) that target which pins are negative? Also, the wires weren't obviously polarized. White and tan aren't negative and positive to me. Only the speaker wire went with a traditional black/red theme, but it failed to help me here, too.
Thirty minutes to fix those, as they were buried in the thickest part of the cabling in the bottom there, and were connected as a ribbon cable, so pulling one meant 2 more popped out every time, and I could only reach them with needle-nose pliers, and not well at that. When they were all fixed, it finally powered on for the first time, but nothing showed up. I looked under the metal 'chute' and saw the CPU fan wasn't spinning. I read for about 20 minutes in the mobo manual, and learned I hadn't hooked a 12V cable specifically for the CPU to the board. Another 10 minutes of digging that out of the rats nest in the drive bay, and trying to run it to its place without getting in the way of fans, or pushing other things into fans.
Then my Ubuntu Gutsy CD wouldn't install. It wouldn't even boot into the liveCD for 15 minutes (each of about 7 times I tried to install it). I had made the CD at work after hours. I used my old PC here (XP) to download it again, but the machine kept crashing (the instability of the old PC is why I got this one), so I had to install a DM (used DownThemAll! in Firefox) to handle the 4 crashes/reboots it took to get the whole thing, resuming after each return, and finally made a new CD, a few hours later. It failed the same way (I/O problem at about 30% files copied over). I burned a DVD this time - maybe different, newer media would work. Same problem.
I went in to work at 10:30PM, after so many hours of problems to download it anew, and reburn it in one, unbroken swoop through XP on another DVD+RW, and back home, about 1.5-2 hours later, it actually, finally, errorlessly installed. It even booted up without the CD to Ubuntu, and looked great.
Then I moved it into my room, hooking it up to just one Dell 1905FP 19" monitor (the TripleHead2Go was too many variables all at once - I wanted to ease it into its new 'fishtank'). It wouldn't boot properly. Ubuntu would start - some near BIOS-level message, and then it would go black, and never go back. Around this time, I switched the old PC back into its place, so I could go online and look things up, but it no longer could go online. I fought that for most of Saturday night, and Sunday proper, and never got it. I had no connection to the outside world for assistance through this period, and just took jabs at everything to see if I could get something to work on the new box.
After HOURS of fighting, I wondered if maybe switching from the VGA cable (all that the 17" monitor above had available) to the DVI on my 19" in my room was the cause. It was. :( I switched to analog, and it booted. It had been booting all the while, but wouldn't show over the DVI, I presume without the right settings enabled, or driver(s) installed.
IMG_2642.JPG
And it boots (posts?). Obviously the disk fails to boot at the bottom, as I haven't installed anything on any of the disks yet. This was just the beginning of days of pain, however.
To get to this point, I had to find out that the outlet in the room here was dead (1/2 hr of fiddling to realize this). Then after finding a 3-prong extension cord, I had to figure out that the PSU wasn't turned on at the back (20 minutes). Then I learned I had all the little fiddly connections (HDD LED, reset, pwr, speaker, etc) backwards. It's too much to ask that these be polarized, or well documented. I read everything, and how I had them was the best way they made sense. It's no fair putting black crosses under some pins. Does that mean they're positive (+)? Maybe they're not pluses, but simply indicators (like 4 lines pointing to the pin) that target which pins are negative? Also, the wires weren't obviously polarized. White and tan aren't negative and positive to me. Only the speaker wire went with a traditional black/red theme, but it failed to help me here, too.
Thirty minutes to fix those, as they were buried in the thickest part of the cabling in the bottom there, and were connected as a ribbon cable, so pulling one meant 2 more popped out every time, and I could only reach them with needle-nose pliers, and not well at that. When they were all fixed, it finally powered on for the first time, but nothing showed up. I looked under the metal 'chute' and saw the CPU fan wasn't spinning. I read for about 20 minutes in the mobo manual, and learned I hadn't hooked a 12V cable specifically for the CPU to the board. Another 10 minutes of digging that out of the rats nest in the drive bay, and trying to run it to its place without getting in the way of fans, or pushing other things into fans.
Then my Ubuntu Gutsy CD wouldn't install. It wouldn't even boot into the liveCD for 15 minutes (each of about 7 times I tried to install it). I had made the CD at work after hours. I used my old PC here (XP) to download it again, but the machine kept crashing (the instability of the old PC is why I got this one), so I had to install a DM (used DownThemAll! in Firefox) to handle the 4 crashes/reboots it took to get the whole thing, resuming after each return, and finally made a new CD, a few hours later. It failed the same way (I/O problem at about 30% files copied over). I burned a DVD this time - maybe different, newer media would work. Same problem.
I went in to work at 10:30PM, after so many hours of problems to download it anew, and reburn it in one, unbroken swoop through XP on another DVD+RW, and back home, about 1.5-2 hours later, it actually, finally, errorlessly installed. It even booted up without the CD to Ubuntu, and looked great.
Then I moved it into my room, hooking it up to just one Dell 1905FP 19" monitor (the TripleHead2Go was too many variables all at once - I wanted to ease it into its new 'fishtank'). It wouldn't boot properly. Ubuntu would start - some near BIOS-level message, and then it would go black, and never go back. Around this time, I switched the old PC back into its place, so I could go online and look things up, but it no longer could go online. I fought that for most of Saturday night, and Sunday proper, and never got it. I had no connection to the outside world for assistance through this period, and just took jabs at everything to see if I could get something to work on the new box.
After HOURS of fighting, I wondered if maybe switching from the VGA cable (all that the 17" monitor above had available) to the DVI on my 19" in my room was the cause. It was. :( I switched to analog, and it booted. It had been booting all the while, but wouldn't show over the DVI, I presume without the right settings enabled, or driver(s) installed.