Play by Play Action

I didn't expect this project to go perfectly smooth, and I haven't been disappointed. As I format the hard drive, I'll recap the action so far:

1. The assembly went pretty well, although I did have some trouble lining up the face plate on the back side. A little gentle persuasion, and things were in place. The drives went in easily (since I've done this part of the job many times before).
2. It took a little while to get all of the cables in place - especially the front panel cables (lights, switches, USB). Things there are pretty small, and my eyesight isn't what it used to be.
3. Time to connect the cables on the back, power up, and .... nothing. No lights, no fans, no nothing. I tried unplugging the floppy drive control cable. Nothing. Disconnect the hard drive and optical drive. Nothing. Remove the front panel USB cables. Nothing. Then I notice that the front panel connector for the power switch is loose. I only had one pin in the connector. Fixed that, and it came right up
4. Except... no video. Tried reseating the video card with no luck. Switched it to a different PCI slot. No luck. Finally, I pulled the card and substituted an old ATI All-In-Wonder. And I get video! I guess the ATI 128 is dead.

So, now the hard drive (I'm using my extra 4GB disk until I get something bigger) is formatting and I'm getting ready to install XP. My dad sent the disk, and he has used it on his machine already. I don't know if Microsoft keeps track of the installs, so we'll see if they let us share a copy.

Uh, oh! This copy of XP my dad sent is the Home Edition! I wanted to get Professional. I'll use this for now, but I've got to get a copy from work. I'll have to find someone in the office to pick it up for me. The only reason I need the Professional version is for the networking features. (I'll talk about the potential Samba configuration in a later post.)

Well, this XP install is taking for ever, and I'm tired. I'm going to bed.

More tomorrow.