Okay, so i need help building a computer

[Dustin_m]

Just a little computer help please....

So i have a bunch of old computer crap in my garage and want to get the usable parts and make one that runs good enough to just fill with hard drives and us for music and basic shit. I have Gateway Pentium 3 that is complete, another tower in there that is an amd athlon 1800 which has most of the shit, but is missing the video card i believe. The other thing i have is some old roommates computer. it has pretty much everything in it, Asus mother board, haven't looked at which processor and what all is in it.

what i want to know is if i take pics of some of the stuff and figure out what it is, can someone give me some pointers as to whats compatible with what? I can figure out the obvious stuff like how to put it together, but i don't know about campatibility and also what to do once it is running, like do i actually have to install the video cards and that stuff?

Gonna go start getting it out to take some pics

 

[Dustin_m]

so i went and got all the shit out. basically in that old roomates case it had the Asus mb, P3 processor, 512 ram, 400w power supply, the sound card and video card. nothing special, but it will work atleast, hopefully. I took all the stuff out and switched everything over to my own case with my hard drives and burner and dvd player

a few questions:
-Is the 400w too much for it, will it do any damage?
-I have 2 hd's in there because they are small. i got the western digital setup as the slave and the other one is a Maxtor. I don't know how it should be set up for master, and the jumper is gone anyway, am i s.o.l.?
-There are two cords coming from the sound card. they are supposed to go on some 4 prong connection. one says J4-CD in and the other is J6-Aux in. where do i connect these?
-The bigger drive was running on my old Athlon machine, will it boot up okay on the pentium?

if any of you guys can answer these, it would be great. thanks

 

[TurboMirage]

the more watts a PS is the better!

 

[Dustin_m]

thanks. one question down, 3 to go. i want to hook this up already and see if it even works after sitting for so long

 

[jeffie7]

Some hard drives will default to auto detect if no jumpers are used. Just put both of them in and turn the computer on, worst case, the computer will just hang around not knowing whats up giving you an HD read error.

The cables from the sound card go to the CD rom drive.

Will it boot up if you just slap the HD into the computer? yes, but you'll have tons of problems since the hard disk has all your old computers devices installed. Just do a clean install of windows.

 

[Dustin_m]

got the cords figured out. its all ready to go. gonna boot it up and install windows again.

 

[Dustin_m]

one more. now how can i install my graphics and sound card? do i have to get the drivers myself or what?

 

[nootrac22]

one more. now how can i install my graphics and sound card? do i have to get the drivers myself or what?

drivers are easily downloaded from the net the manufacture will almost always have the drivers available. as to how to install the sound card will go into a PCI slot will have an obvious slot in the motherboard and an aluminum knock out in the back of the tower chassie. the graphics card depends on what type of connection it uses 3 main ones are PCI (see explination for sound card on how to install), AGP diffrent connector will only fit AGP slot installs the same tho, and PCI-E only in fairly new comps I don't have much info on them. If you know the make and modle number send it to me and I could let you know or send pic

 

[nootrac22]

btw windows will usually autodetect, but you still might need to dl drivers

 

[Dustin_m]

Found the drivers for the video card. now can i just install this after i install windows?

 

[endlesszeal]

First, I would stick the 512mb into the Athlon if you can. Smash a PIII and competes with with old P4s well.

More watts it good, but most important is amp. More amp is better than more watts. For older system, 16a or more on the 12v line is ideal for stability.

Second, you dont need any cables to go from soundcard to cd-rom drive because if you have Windows XP, the IDE will take care of that.

As in selecting for master or slave, look up the model numbers of the hdd and scrub up a jumper, easy as pie. Pull one from an unused mobo if you have too, plenty on them.

Second, if you can, make a slipstream copy of Windows with all the current updates. If its XP, get SP2 updates and it will contain a majority of drivers to cover you. Once Windows is installed, go to my computer. Hardware manager and see if there are any yellow !! marks. That indicates need driver.

 

[Dustin_m]

so i got everything up and running, but it keeps saying that there is a disk read error when it is booting up. it says it right when it searches the drives for a boot record. So what doesn this mean? is just not finding an o/s to boot from or what? Second, the copy of windows i got is in an ISO and in the instructions says it should boot from that, but it doesn't. anyone know anything about that?

 

[endlesszeal]

if u have an os in there already, try getting to windows repair console and running chkdsk. it sounds like it could be a drive going bad.

 

[endlesszeal]

did u reformat and install a fresh copy of windows? when you change cpu/motherboard, sometimes it becomes incompatiable and you need a fresh windows install.

 

[Dustin_m]

well i dl'ed a copy of XP, its an ISO and it said to burn the ISO directly on a disk and set the BIOS up to read the cd-rom first so it would boot from there, but it doesn't work. I think i wiped this drive clean so theres no operating system on it. so how do i go about getting windows installed?

oh and i changed it all back over to the athlon