Ongoing New Build Zalman HD160XTPlus (1 Viewer)

[finrudd341]

I started this morning, and now I feel old...it's been so long since I built my last PC...where did all this SATA and stuff come from? The Zalman case has more bits to plug into the motherboard than I know what to do with, but so far so good - I may even get to power it on by tommorrow for the first time. Many people seem to have problems running the 7" display screen, so I plan to run it from the VGA socket on the motherboard, and use the EN8500GT for the TV instead...not sure if this will work..

The final spec is:

Case: Zalman HD160-XT PLUS Case (Silver) x1
Motherboard: Asustek P5E-V HDMI L775
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Processor
Graphics: Asus EN8500GT Silent Magic 512MB PCIE
TV-Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 x1 (Not got it yet - still not sure...)
RAM: Kingston PC5300 DDR2 2048Mb x2
HDD: Western Digital WD10EACS 1000Gb x2 (Media only - RAID 1 - that's the plan, anyway)
HDD: Western Digital WD1600JS 160GB x 1 (boot drive)
DVD/CD-ROM: Samsung S203D 20x SATA Black DVD-RW x1
PSU: Zalman ZM600-HP Heatpipe Cooled 600W Modular PSU x1
Cooling: Zalman CNPS8500 LED CPU Fan x1 (got the CNPS9700 too - 20mm too tall, no refunds in Singapore...)

Software: Windows XP Pro SP2 (bottled out on getting Vista)
Media Software: MediaPortal - latest version

The plan is to have it all plugged in tonight - if I can just work out those funny small cables, and where all the fans go!

 

[finrudd341]

update

WEll, the wife insisted I leave it be, and sleep on the problems of where everything plugged in. I did the first power on last night, but without success, as I had missed on of the main motherboard power plugs. The CPU fan came to life, as did the DVD - the HDD's were so darn quiet I could not hear if they were live or not. The screen remained off, but I realised later that the CPU power was not on..

This case has so many fans, I just don't know what to do with them - I have adapters that use the old style HDD/OD power plugs, that then feed off into 2x5v fan plugs and 2 x 12v fan plugs. I am now looking to see if my fans should be running at 5v or 12v...

So far so good - might even get the O/S loaded today!

 

[finrudd341]

Setting up RAID1

OK, so Windows XP is installed on an 80GB partition of the 160GB drive, and the two 1TB drives are formated. I have tried using the Asus application to setup RAID1 on the two 1TB drives, but it does not seem to like it - as soon as I change the SATA config from IDE to RAID, the system fails to boot. Slightly odd...anyone got any ideas as to what the problem might be please?

RAID still not working, but I am not too worried about this at the moment, as I have not transferred any media yet. I managed to totally nanny the XP install. To cut a long story short, it installed Windows on drive H - most readers here will probably say 'ah, he forgot to disable the 5-in-1 card reader before running the XP installation..' - yeah - I know that now. I then made matters worse by changing the drive letter allocation for the H drive back to C, against all good advice from those clever chaps at Microsoft...bad move.

I am now going to flatten the drive, disconnect the card reader, and re-install from scratch.

On a positive note - I was really dissapointed with the noise the whole thing made - until I ran the fan setup app that comes with the motherboard - problem solved. This really is near silent, and so far is running very cool too.

I will have to read up on how Asus does the RAID setup in more detail - it seems dependent on having a floppy drive. Now that I do know about - in fact I have some blank 5.25 floppy disks around somewhere - I take it this is what they mean?? Seriously though - do we really still have to use these things?? I will dig a USB version out from work I guess..

 

[finrudd341]

After reading pages and pages on the internet about RAID setup on the ASUS board, and installing XP over 5 times, I managed to work out where I was going wrong. I tried all the usual tricks for fooling the PC that the USB A drive was a real 'A' drive, which did not work. I tried an n-lite method of installing XP so I did not need an 'A' drive. I tried using a thumb-drive instead of an 'A' drive..no luck. Every time I booted Windows with the RAID configured, it blue-screened on me.

I finally realised my mistake - I was only configuring RAID in the BIOS after installing XP, and using the F6 option (eventually resorted to an IDE 'A' drive that someone found at work for me). This did not work. I simply configured RAID in the BIOS, then proceeded with the XP installation, with F6 option selected, loading my Intel RAID drivers as I went. It worked straight away after this, and my 2 x 1TB WD10EACS drives are now acting as a RAID 1 mirror quite happily.

I have loaded Media Portal and given the setup a quick run, but still have a fair bit of work to do before I will be connecting this to the TV and AV receiver. My next task is to determine which TV tuner card to use. I was fairly set on the Hauppage WinTV 350 or 500 cards, but then along came the BlackGold 6-in-1 card...I just don't know.

On another note: so far, the Zalman supplied remote is doing everything I want it to...and appears to be running with Windows XP in-built drivers...I will have to see what the limitations are, but so far so good. Similarly the 7" screen - it works well as a stand alone screen, but I have yet to try the dal screen setup. Ideally, I wanted this screen to run on the motherboards VGA output, and the TV to run from the GPU card, but I think this won't be so easy...

 

[Shivian]

Interesting... considering the 2x1TB drives are not your boot drive, I wonder why it would need you to load the drives like that. I think that if you were to remove your raid drives (disconnect them - this won't hurt any data), I reckon your computer won't boot because the bootsector has been written to the 1TB drives.

 

[finrudd341]

I am going to give this a try, and will let you know - the main problem was a total inability to follow the RAID driver installations instructions, but hopefully I did get it right.

At present, my Media Portal installation is only running on the old Shuttle XPC test-rig, as a house move has meant the Zalman is back in the box. I also wanted to be really sure I have my media set up correctly, before I start filling the media drives on the HTPC. I think I do, thanks to some useful guides on how to arrange DVD collections in the Wiki's here. I am also back to using a 15 year old CRT TV, which is next to useless...just waiting for the sales to start in Singapore towards end of May. I have my eye on a 42" Sharp Aquos HD...

 

[Shivian]

The general process I use for setting up a RAID array in windows is the following:

Assuming bootdrive is a physical single drive
1) Only connect the boot drive. This ensures your boot sector and C: allocation goes to the drive you want them to go on!
2) Install windows on your boot drive.
3) Power down
4) Connect Raid drives
5) Go into bios and configure RAID array.
6) Boot into windows. The RAID array should be present and working but just with generic drivers. Check in Computer Management -> Disk Management in your Administrative Tools to verify. The RAID array should definitely appear there at this point!
7) Install RAID drivers then from in Windows. This gives optimal speed and features but is not required to use the drives in windows.

For installing the OS onto RAID drives:
1) Only connect the boot drives. This ensures your boot sector and C: allocation goes to the drive you want them to go on!
2) Go into bios and configure RAID array.
2) Install windows - press F6 to install RAID drivers on the install.
3) Power down.
4) Connect other hard drives.
5) Success! You should now be able to boot into windows fine.

EDIT: When you setup a RAID array in BIOS, you usually have to name it. You should be able to find a reference to that name in Disk Management (Administrative Tools -> Computer Management).