Well, it's Tuesday evening, and the parts are all here; the next step is getting it all together!
Here's my parts list:
You may recognize the video card from last week. It's the same card. The one that came in the bundle wasn't as good.
(Fast forward) 8
Well, it took me about an hour and a half to get the computer built. Not too shabby. But that's when the "fun" began.
First try at installing Vista Ultimate 64 bit was looking great, until it hung on the final (or at least what looked like the final) phase of the install and configuration, "Completing Installation. . ." My first guess was dirty media, so I wiped the DVD clean (physically, not the data!) and tried again. It died in the same place. So, I thought "Maybe I'm just not waiting long enough. It's getting late anyway; I'll just start the install and go to bed." Nope. That didn't work either. I got up Wednesday morning at 5:30 and still, not done and sitting in the same place. "Completing Installation. . ." All I could think of was "No, you're not! That's the problem!" It's time to do some research.
(Fast forward) 8
After searching for some time, I found that sometimes the SATA driver from Microsoft isn't completely compatible with the nVidia SATA chipset. So it seems that the data going to the hard drive is being corrupted and is then not able to be read, which is a bit of a problem. After many attempts, half attempts and one or two near successes, it was after 5PM on the Wednesday. This is taking more time than I wanted it to.
(Fast forward) 8
OK, and now it's 8PM on Wednesday. I've decided to take out the ATI video card on the off chance it's conflicting with the nVidia GPU on the motherboard. We'll see if this install works. And yes, I need to re-install because something got horked up and it wouldn't boot. Hopefully we won't have a power failure along with the thunderstorm that's going over right now. That would be bad (but not totally unexpected, given the way this project has gone).
(Fast forward) 8
And the fun continues. It's now 8PM on Thursday. 24 hours since I took out the ATI video card, with still no joy in mudville. To be honest, I don't know how I haven't gone completely bald or completely insane because of this. I've NEVER had an installation go this bad. Blue screens or hangs at seemingly random times. There's no way to diagnose, because the dump doesn't get put on the hard drive. Sometimes the install blue screens during the initial phase. And what the heck is are PTEs?
(Fast forward) 8
I just got off the phone with the ASUS technical support folks (after the third try. The first two the line when dead as the tech came on). They seem to think that the problem isn't with the motherboard (big surprise) but with the media from Microsoft. I won't write that off, I've seen it before. In fact, I've seen viruses from Microsoft software; pristine, from the factory CDs with a virus on it. It does happen. So I'm going to try putting Windows 7 on it instead of Vista. The tech suggested XP, but I don't know that I have an XP disk I can install from. So I'm burning the Windows 7 x64 RC to a DVD to try that.
(Fast forward) 8
As I expected, Win7 wouldn't install either. Linux won't even recognize the video card. <sarcasm> I wonder what that could mean! </sarcasm>
(Fast forward) 8
It's now Friday morning, around 11AM, and I just got off the phone with the great folks at TigerDirect. I have nothing but praise for these folks. They definitely know how to do customer service. A 5 minute phone call, and the new motherboard will be here (but in three to four business days). Once it's here I can send back the dead one. The biggest problem I can see with this whole thing is that frag-mom is still frag-box-less. I'm going to have to hook up the dead Dell again and pray it works for a few days. The saga continues.
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