Building a 1.2 GHz DDR Athlon with the Iwill KA266-R Motherboard
Install Drives and Peripherals
Now that our barebones computer is working, its time
to insert our drives and give this computer an operating system.
Install the hard drive, floppy drive, and CD-ROM. The hard drive is
attached by ribbon cable to the IDE 0 connector on the motherboard,
the CD-ROM is attached by a separate ribbon cable to the IDE 1 connector
on the motherboard (you don't want the hard drive on the same cable
and have your ATA 100 drive running at ATA 33 speed), and the floppy
drive connects by a third ribbon cable to the floppy connector on
the motherboard.
Attach power connectors to all the drives, and don't forget to attach
the CD-ROM sound cable to the CD-ROM sound out connector on the motherboard
(or on your sound card if you choose to disable onboard sound).
The main reason drives don't work is that ribbon or power cables are
attached incorrectly. More detailed information on installing hard
drives can be found in our article, Adding
a Second Hard Drive.
Is the Floppy Drive Extinct?? I thought long and hard
about putting a floppy drive in my new potential server. After
all, the floppy drive is nearly extinct. Isn't it? Couldn't
I just use another computer's floppy drive that's on my network?
For some reason I decided to buy a floppy anyway (about $30),
and I'm glad I did. Turns out there are still many drivers
on floppy and I needed a floppy to run the DOS hard drive
copying software.
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Attach Keyboard, Mouse, Speakers, and Printer Cable.
Now is a good time to attach all your external devices to your computer.
This should be done with the power still turned off. Attach the mouse,
keyboard, speaker connector, printer cable, and other devices to the
appropriate external ports on the back of the computer.
Install Windows Me
To save time, I decided I would copy my old C:\ to my
new C:\ and save myself the time of reloading Windows Me and all my
software. Hard drive copying software is included in most hard drive
kits, as it was in the Western Digital ATA 100, 40 GB, 7200 RPM kit
purchased as the new computer's C: drive.
Western Digital ATA 100, 40 GB, 7200 RPM Kit - Drive, ATA 100
cable, copying software, and lots of documentation.
Before I began the copy procedure I installed my old
C: drive in the case, set the jumper pins on both drives, and attached
the old drive to the new drives ribbon cable. (If you want the details
on how to slave one drive to another, see the previously mentioned
article, Adding a Second
Hard Drive.)
After installing the second drive, the only thing left to do was to
boot up, hit Delete to enter the BIOS, and change the first boot device
to floppy. I then inserted the Western Digital copying software into
the A:\ drive, let the computer boot up and followed the menu prompts
to begin copying the contents of my old drive to my new drive.
Caution: A Windows Startup Disk is needed for the
copying software to install the operating system on the new
drive. If you don't have a current Startup Disk available,
you can make a new one by following the instructions in our
article, Adding
a Second Hard Drive.
Make sure you have a current Windows Startup Disk before you
remove your old hard drive.
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While it took the better part of an hour for the old
drive's contents to be copied to the new drive, I feel this saved
a lot of time compared to reloading Windows from scratch and reloading
all software.
Booting into Windows. After the copying was done,
I rebooted the computer. Windows ME booted into Safe Mode. This didn't
surprise me as I knew there were additional drivers I had to load,
and that some drivers had to be deleted.
After about 15 minutes of driver loading and tweaking I was able to
boot into Windows Me.
I then had to load additional software programs that came with the
Iwill KA266-R motherboard which included:
Audio Rack Sound Utility (onboard sound driver and utility)
Hardware Monitoring Utility (heat monitor)
AMI IDE RAID Easy Setup (haven't played with this yet).
Next we evaluate
the Motherboard and Peripherals >>>
<<< Back to
Adding DDR DRAM and attaching Accessory Connectors
