[Denisejm]

I just went into BIOS. Keyboard support was disabled and I enabled it. Funny though . . . I didn't get the window to choose Start Normally or Last Known Settings that Worked again. It booted straight to my desktop this time. I'll let you know how it works when it happens again.

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Let's hope that keeps up!

[Troy]

Let's hope that keeps up!

[Denisejm]

Hi Troy,

I just wanted to let you know that enabling the keyboard in BIOS did the trick. About 1/2 hour ago was the first time the window opened since I made the change in BIOS and the up/down/Enter keys worked. Thanks. . .  

[Denisejm]

HI

I've been using the computer for a week now and it's running very well. It's fast and it's so nice to have most of my drives internal instead of external. Even though there are 12 drives and several fans inside the case, it's very quiet. I'm very pleased with it.

One problem that I have is that there are still times when it takes several resets in order for it to boot to my desktop. I'm wondering if it's one of the drives that's causing the problem. When it was an external drive, there were times that my computer would freeze up until I turned it off. I don't know which drive it is now because I changed the drive letters but I'll eventually be replacing the 750G hdds for either 1T or 2T hdds and, hopefully, doing that will solve the problem.

I just bought new 24 inch cables to replace the 40+ inch cables that came with the adapter card. They should arrive within a week. I also bought a round floppy cable so that I could replace the ribbon cable. When everything arrives, I'll be taking the Firewire and SATA adapter cards out of my old pc and installing them in this one because I have 2 firewire hdds that I have connected as USB 2.0 right now and I have an external case that I used to format a new SATA hdd that this computer didn't recognize and so wouldn't format it. After I formatted it using the SATA ext case and formatted it, this new computer recognized it. I think it would be good to have around even if I don't use it much.

The other problem that I have is regarding the ports that are on top of the case (1 firewire port, 2 USB 2.0 ports and Mic In connector). I cann't find ports for them on the motherboard. I'm not sure if they're not there or if I'm just not seeing how to connect them. The cables each come with 2 connectors, either one 3-pin or 4-pin and one 1-pin. They're flat and small, like the led light connectors.

Anyway, after a week of use, I just wanted to let you know how well the pc is performing and how happy I am with it. Everyone who I showed it too was very impressed with the sheer size of the case and the number of drives that are in it. They also remember the mess that I had with all the externals that I had and how clean it looks now. I told them about all the help that I received with picking out the parts and the problems cleared up during the build from people at Geeks to Go so you might be hearing from some of them


.

[Troy]

Good to hear it runs (mostly) well.

It's possible one of the hard drives is causing hassles, with the number of hard drives you have installed in your system, it's going to take a while to properly diagnose and find said hard drive.

For the motherboard ports, have a good look at your motherboard manual - there will be a page with information about the front panel connectors (or F_PANEL) or similar. From memory, the USB and Audio ones shouldn't be too difficult, although there may not be a firewire one if the motherboard doesn't have onboard firewire.

Cheers

Troy

[Denisejm]

Hi Troy,

The pc runs really well once it boots to my desktop. After that, it's terrific. Isolating the problematic hdd will take time. I ran the Error Scan of the HD Tune Test on all of the hdds but it found no damaged "blocks," and ChkDsk didn't find any either and, I haven't seen any problems with any of the drives when I'm using them. This pc is so much faster than my old pc. It used to take about 2 minutes for a 750Mb movie to move/copy from one drive to another. It takes only about 20 seconds with this computer. I haven't had the need to reboot like I used to with my old pc. I've left it on for 2 days straight, which I couldn't do without multiple problems with my old pc. I shut it off just about every night now though.

I've looked at the front panel connectors and there aren't any connectors for any of the cables that came with the case, the type that I mentioned in my last post. I could do without them but they would be handy if they worked. I'll be opening the tower again so that I can swap the really long cables that came with the adapater card with the shorter ones I bought and I'll check out the connectors on the mobo again. The mobo schematic doesn't show any connectors for these cables that I could see. The mobo has firewire and USB buses and there's a USB 2.0 port for USB 2.0 hdds but the case connectors aren't compatible with them.

This info came from the manual:

Internal I/O Connectors
• 1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector
• 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connector
• 1 x floppy disk drive connector
• 1 x IDE connector
• 10 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors
• 1 x CPU fan header
• 2 x system fan headers
• 1 x power fan header
• 1 x front panel header
• 1 x front panel audio header
• 1 x CD In connector
• 1 x S/PDIF In header
• 1 x S/PDIF Out header
• 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers
• 3 x IEEE 1394a headers
• 1 x serial port header
• 1 x chassis intrusion header
• 1 x power LED header
• 1 x power switch
• 1 x reset switch
• 1 x clearing CMOS switch

[Denisejm]

Hi,

I'm having a heat issue with the pc. The case has 4 fans . . . 1 fan blows air from inside the case onto the drives on one side of the drive rack and one fan blows air from the outside onto the drives on the other side of the drive rack. The 3rd fan is in the rear of the case and it blows in air from the outside. The 4th fan is inside the case and blows air onto the cpu, mobo and graphics card.

I don't know if the cpu, mobo or graphics card are getting too hot but today the graphics card fan was groaning. I opened the case and removed the fans and the graphics card and cleaned them using a pc brush and pencil vacuum to get dust out. There wasn't much dust in the case. I clean the grillwork for the fans pretty often, about once every two or three weeks.

I installed HD Tune which gives the temperature of the drives that I have connected to the mobo. The average temperature is 51ºC. I have a vornado fan blowing on the outside of the case where the drives are located which keeps the temps down a bit. One of my 1T drives that I bought last December is having problems with "reallocated sector count" and "spin retry count."

I ran SeaTools for DOS and received a warning message when I tried to perform a "Long Test" on the drives connected to the mobo. The warning stated that the drives had been overheated and it asked me if I still wanted to perform the test.

None of the fans are connected to the mobo because there aren't any ports for the connectors. The pins don't match.

I was wondering if there is a way that I could increase the speed of the fans so that the components would stay cooler.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

[Denisejm]

Hi everybody.  I'm not sure if anybody is still following this thread but I just want to let you know that it's been over 9 years now that we built my computer and it's still running pretty good, still fast, and I still have 12 2T hard drives full of files.  I've had to replace the power supply 3 times, 2 or 3 hard drives, the psu fan once, the DVD drive once and the floppy drive once but the mobo, cpu and ram haven't had any problems.  Microsoft has stopped support for Windows XP Pro X64 several years ago so I've received no updates since then.  I can't watch YouTube video any longer either.  But the rest of it is good.  I'm not sure how much longer it'll last but it's been doing exactly what I wanted it to do and I've been really happy with it.

 

I hope you all are doing very well.  All the great help you gave me building this pc is the reason it's still running so well.  Thanks very much!

 

Denise

[phillpower2]

Not many/all of the members or staff in your thread have been around for a while so I will say hello on their behalf Denisejm