Greetings Rob & all. My New rig off your site

[afterglow]

Hi. Well Rob your site is well don, clearly laid out & after reading it I decided to build my first PC. THX 4 your guidance.
I've just put together this lot.

Case: Aspire x-qpack mATX
mobo: Asrock Alivenf6G-DVI
CPU: AMD Athlon 3500+ Skt AM2 2.2Ghz
Mem: 1GB crucial DDR2
HDD: WD800JD 80 GB Caviar SE
OptD: Sony AW G170AB2 18xDVDRW+-

I built this one 4 my 9 yr old daughter who doeasn't live with me. So I wanted a simple, stable, future proof system that a kid can enjoy most things on. There is no floppy, it's a small case and a small HDD but why would a 9 yr old need anything bigger right now? . And guess what I went and bought a retail version of vista 32 bit.
So the build goes so smooth I nearly got bored. I like the idea of a micro case. It's sexy with a slide out tray to mount the mobo. All went well. First booot cool/ second boot too.
Now your suggestion of a diagnostic test on the HD seemed cool so I went to my laptop and downloaded the thing from Western Digital and burned it to a CD. Just couldn't get that puppy to recognise it in the new rig though.
So I put in the mobo disc and It kept asking to make a boot disk y/n. If I hit y then it said put a floopy in and of course there wasn't one. So my first point is: Surely we don't need to install a floppy drive any more. USB sticks and DVD ROM's can handle it. What is your view.!
So I'm at a dead end with no where to go. The BIOS menu for this mobo is user friendly and I checked the settings a dozen times. Nothing going so I thought well, put in a different CD or DVD and I chucked in Vista.
The bloody thing read it and installed smoothly which is cool... BUT I'm left with an OP SYS installed on the C: drive and I never got the chance to set up any partitions. :mad: So now it's too late. I really wanted to set up partitions so this is a negative. :( Should I format the HDD and start again?
I'm not sure. It's the experience I'm after and I would prefer having partitions.
Bit of a long post, I gotta get dinner together.
catch up soon. Thanks again man.

[Rob]

I always include a floppy drive in the computers I build. I know they're not sexy. And some people may feel like their computer won't be modern if it includes a floppy drive. But I'm not bothered by that at all. I figure the computer case as a bay for it, and the motherboard has a place to connect it, and the power supply includes a power connector for it, and the motherboard comes with a cable for it, and it only costs $10, so why wouldn't I include a floppy drive? - peer pressure?

One way to get around a floppy drive is a process called slipstreaming. I'm aware of it, but I haven't tried it. A quick google turns up a link like this which might be helpful.
http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2005/08/28/423901.aspx

I'm not sure your best way to partition at this point. There are utilities like PartitionMagic which can do it without losing any data, but it's a product that must be purchased.

[DemonicDerek]

So let me get this straight...

Your designing a computer for your 9 year old and you want it to be sexy?

That makes no logical sense at all. If it were an 11 or 12 year old then it may start to make sense becuase the computer would live long enough for the kid to actually want it to look that way.

Note: I consider the average life of a computer before it is neglected or outdated to be 5-6 years. I have a 4 year old computer and it is still running however the sound card is starting to turn into crap and the video card is shit.

p.s. I laugh at your judgement of what 9 year olds want.

[afterglow]

Maybe you have mis-understood or I explained not too well.
This mATX case has perspex sides and top. So now my kid can see in there and may wonder how it all works rather than it being just a box under the desk that responds to her commands. It looks sexy !!

[afterglow]

Hi Rob.
Yeah a floppy is an easy and sometimes useful thing to have.
I'm still trying to get a response from Asrock that will get the right Ethernet controller drivers onto this board . In doing so I came across something that seems odd. You know the little "safely remove hardware" icon at bottom right that you can clik to remove a mem stick etc. If I clik that it offers up my Western digital hard drive for removal. I would have thought that something as important as the hard drive wouldn't be made available to this option. Do you know a way of protecting it.?

[Rob]

A quick google shows a lot of message boards with a post about this. Apparently it's a SATA II hard drive thing. Have you installed the motherboard chipset drivers?

[afterglow]

Hi there.
yes I've installed what drivers were available off the Asrock disc but i have my doubts about how current they are.(The BIOS on the disc was V1.30 and the updated version I flashed it to off their site was v1.90). Still no LAN utility. I'm searching for a driver for the "NVIDIA network bus enumerator" which is the utility that vista doesn't support.
BTW. I put the Vista disc in and ran it from BIOS. It went straight to a "memory check" that ran 2 checks on total memory. It took about 8 mins with my small 80 G WD and came up with an all clear. That may be a win version of the WD mem test that you described.