Sinatra is Alive!

The parts I ordered to build the new computer arrived Monday so as soon I returned home, I set my attention to assembling the machine. Most of the hardware assembly was smooth sailing. The only part of the assembly that gave me some trouble was after I had installed the DVD and floppy drives. To install those drives, I had to remove the front of the case in order to remove the face plates that line the outside of the drive bays. The drives installed without a hitch, but getting the front of the case back on proved difficult. Basically, there were two pairs of plastic tabs just behind the hole on the case front that prevented the DVD drive from fitting through it. I ended up having to file both sets of tabs down just a little bit to get the front of the case to fit around the drive.

I started the assembly at around 7pm and by 10:30pm, the moment of truth when I powered on the machine was a relief when I saw the monitor flicker as the board ran its POST. All systems were go and a few minutes later, I was checking to make sure that all of the drives were recognized and adjusting the boot drive sequence in the BIOS. I'm never happier to see the words "BOOT DISK FAILURE! PLEASE INSERT A BOOTABLE DISK.", than after a successful hardware installation.

I had wanted to be done with the hardware installation on Monday night, but I didn't quite make it because I hadn't routed any of the cables in any discernable order to make things look clean. The inside of the case was just a jumble of power cables, data cables, and electronics. So last night, I spent a couple of hours rerouting the cables to make the area around the motherboard as easy to work on as possible. There's still a couple of audio cables from the front panel that I wish could be routed differently, but unfortunately they are not long enough to reach all the way to the back of the case without cutting straight across the RAM just under the CPU. It's not pretty, but it has to be that way.

After that was done, I started in on my least favorite part of the process, installing the operating system. The installation process itself is never that difficult, but the tedious process of reestablishing internet connectivity and getting all of the necessary hardware drivers installed can sometimes be a real pain. I had some initial trouble getting my internet connectivity back because the drivers that control the built-in ethernet port on the motherboard weren't installed initially. I inserted the driver CD that came with the motherboard and proceeded to load any drivers and software that had something to do with networking on an nForce chipset motherboard. That turned out to be a mistake. I'll get to that a little later.

My plan for Tuesday night was to 1) Install the OS, 2) Install the latest chipset drivers, 3) Flash the BIOS to the latest version, and 4) Install the latest video drivers. Once I had an internet connection, I almost immedeatly began getting popup windows that were reporting some scary things like, "Windows has detected 55 critical registry errors!" and "Every computer that isn't running ME is going to self-destruct in 30 seconds!" Since this was a clean install, those messages seemed fishy. So I ignored the warnings, plowed ahead with my installation of Service Pack 2, and as I suspected, those messages went away. I later discovered that it was a flaw in Service Pack 1a that caused Windows Messenger to send reports like that erroneously. How... helpful.

Once I had Service Pack 2 installed, it was time to grab the latest nForce4 drivers. Remember that I had just installed a bunch of drivers for the motherboard as well as some software. It wasn't necessarily a mistake to install the drivers, but I also installed the nVidia Firewall and the nVidia Network Administration Management (NAM) tools. Nothing seemed awry until I went to nVidia's support website to download the latest version of the nForce chipset drivers. I started the download, which seemed abnormally slow, and once they were successfully downloaded I began the installation process. However, I was only seconds into the installation when Windows quickly reported that the file that I had downloaded was corrupt. So, I tried downloading it again with the same results. I tried downloading the file from all three mirror sites also with the same results. I tried downloading beta drivers from third party sites still with identical results: FILE IS CORRUPT!

At this point, I knew something was weird so I Googled "corrupt nForce4 drivers" and found a wealth of information that all pointed to the nVidia Firewall and the NAM tools as a source of many corrupt downloads and heaps of frustration. So, I uninstalled those tools and rebooted. On reboot, the OS failed to start. I restarted the machine again and began to consider a format and another fresh install. While I was searching for my printed instructions about how to do that, I had neglected to watch the screen and when I looked up, it was asking me if I wanted to boot into Safe Mode or try for normal operation. But I had missed the countdown. Windows began to boot up normally and I crossed my fingers. Lo and behold, it worked! Finally, I had some success.

With the Firewall and NAM culprits out of the system, the nForce download and install went smoothly. Once I had the new chipset drivers installed, I went to my motherboard's support site, downloaded the latest BIOS and flashed it to the chip. All was still well with the world. Lastly, around 1am, I put the finishing touches on the basics of my new system by installing the video drivers. Earlier, Amy had come up with the idea of naming all of the computers on the eventual network after crooners. So my new machine, Sinatra, is up and running and will be ready for its debut on Thursday, with Evan and Serious Sam 2. I can't wait.