Sunday, January 30, 2011

3 weeks on the new machine.

Over the New Years weekend I put together a new machine and loaded Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

What I learnt.
  • Power connectors have changed. In addition to the 24 pin EATXPWR socket, there was a 4 pin ATX12V that I'ld not seen before. It's halfway across the board too.

  • The current graphics card standards has changed. Installed my first PCI Express 2.0 x16 card.

  • My mother board came with 2 Serial ATA 6.0Gb/s cables and 2 Serial ATA 6.0Gb/s cables. This was the only place I had fun & games with. No marking of cables to say which is which.


The third point was the only one that caused a problem. Initial I built the machine with one SATA DVD drive & one SATA hard disk drive. Worked fine. I then added the drive that contained part of the /home directory from my old machine. After that the boot sequence hung. I then swapped the cable connecting the DVD with the cable on the second hard drive and it all worded fine. So speed was important to the hard drive working, but not for the DVD drive. Go figure.