Computer building pitfalls to avoid

While I saved about $150 building this computer myself (I saved even more by using my old computer parts like case, DVD drives, hard drives and PCI cards) I have found myself wasting a lot of time troubleshooting things that I probably wouldn't have if someone else built the computer. Looking back though, I would still build it myself just for the experience and fun of putting it all together. One thing I have learned is if you don't know what it's for....you shouldn't enable it!! I ended up turning on something called Boot Manager that came with 7Tools Partition Manager. Don't enable it unless you know what you're doing. It caused me to reinstall my operating system because I didn't know what I was doing.

So here is a list of problems I ran into in this whole process:
1) My motherboard only suppors two IDE devices through the built in IDE controller. My first set of problems came when I tried to install Windows XP to the hard drive connected to the Motherboard through tehDVD-ROM drive connected to my PCI IDE controller. For some reason when the drivers were being loaded form the Windows XP CD, it could no longer read from the drive. So I ended up connecting one DVD-ROM drive and one Hard Drive to the Motherboard IDE controller to install Windows XP....everything was fine. Once installed, I connected the main hard drive and slave hard drvie to the motherboard IDE controller and all other devices to the PCI IDE controller. (by the way this was an XP repair install not a fresh clean install on a new partition)

2) I installed a couple games to the system drive but for some rerason they would not launch. Games that ran off the hard drive (like the Call of Duty 4 Demo) worked fine. The full version of Call of Duty 4 did not work. I knew my system was powerful enough to run the game since the dome worked, so I ended up installing Windows XP fresh over my old system. Same problem. The solution was to connect the DVD drives to the motherboard IDE controller instead of the PCI IDE controller. Problem solved....everything works fine now. I don't know why that makes a difference but it does. Had I known these issues, I may have researched a bit more into a motherboard with TWO IDE controllers built in.

3) 7Tools Partition Manager and Restorer 2000 are great programs worth every penny I paid for each. They have saved me on numerous occasions when I needed ot recover information off a hard drive or had to repartition a drive without blasting over it. However, in 7Tools Partition Manager there is an option for enabling a boot manager. I do not know what this does, but for some reason I enabled it anyway. BIG mistake. It caused my system to go into a never ending reboot loop where I could not get into the operating system. So I had to re-install Windows XP again. In this process I also lost my largest 250GB hard drive and all its contents. I was able to use Restorer 200 to recover most of it, but some files were corrupted and some were just too big, I had no place to put them. I also lost about 120GB of space on my drive. I'm still trying to figure that one out, but lesson learned....if you don't know what it does, don't mess with it!!

All in all it was a very enlightening learning experience to put this fancy little computer together. I don't at all regret buying the pieces from NewEgg and building it myself, I just wish I had known about the whole IDE thing earlier and ESPECIALLY I wish I had not enabled Boot Manager! Lesson learned. At this point all of my games work, my encoding software is lightning fast and both of my LCD screens look great!