Geekspace for Women

Posted by ubergeeke on October 21st, 2008 in blogpost

Good news and bad news.

The good news is that I got all my parts (yay!), including racks and rails that will work to put two of the three 3.5 inch hard drives in 5+ inch drive bays. Since I’m using onboard audio and video, I don’t need to add any additional cards, and the motherboard I’m using has onboard SATA. I’ve installed over 2GB of RAM, a DVD-ROM drive and two 120GB hard drives, and have a 500GB drive just waiting for hardware.

The bad news is that I don’t have the motherboard specifications, so I’m having a challenging time getting everything plugged into the right spots. (All of this so I can make a little headway towards a “competitor’s” 5.5 TB media server. Oh, you know who you are. Taunting me with all your oh-so-cool storage. I’ll match it. Yes, someday I will, and *without* the bananaphone song!) Case in point: can’t find the slot to connect the DVD audio, and several of the smaller power connectors don’t match up correctly on the board. (Hey, is the plastic *supposed* to bend that way?) Oh, and I ran out of tiny screws.

Looks like another trip to Free Geek for screws, and a little time on the web looking for the motherboard specs. (Hey, it’s a recycled motherboard - it didn’t come with the manual!)

More news as it happens. I will say this: it’s great getting dirty again digging through PC internals. It’s been awhile.

Have you built a PC recently? What kinds of challenges did you have?