First build, some questions.....

[spiralizer]

Hey there everyone,

Let me get it out of the way and tell you i'm a noob at PC building.

I just started my first build. So far I have:

-AMD phenom ii x4 955 BE

-Asus M4A785TD-V EVO 785G RT Motherboard

-2 gb G.Skill DDR3 RAM

-OCZ 700 Watt Power Supply

-Lancool case w/3 fans

I have put that all together and checked for post. It powered up, but went to some screen about not having the proper boot drive or something like that. I assume it was because I have not CD or HDD hooked up.
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Now the questions.

First of all, I am broke right now and don't have enough $$$ to buy a new hard drive and CD drive yet. I was wondering if I could use my old CD and HDD out of my previous computer. I'm sure you could just pop in the CD drive, but is it recommended that I wipe my old HDD before installing it into my new PC? Should I even do it at all? I don't want to ruin anything, but i'm excited to mess around with the new one. I would be using my old HDD as my new primary (and only!) HDD. Is this ok to do?

Second, I don't know what to expect when turning the PC on for the first time, is there anything in particular a first time builder like myself should look for or do first thing? I don't know much about BIOS, but I don't think i'll have too much of a problem with it.

Third, my cpu's heatsink seemed difficult to snap into place, I felt like I used a lot of force to get it set. Is that normal? There seemed to be 2 different ways it would snap on and no directions to tell me if one way was better than the other.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

 

[asteldian]

Reusing an old CD drive is fine and easy.

Reusing an old HDD is possible, however you will have to reinstall windows on it. Currently the old HDD is formatted and programmed to work on your old motherboard, in a new machine when you attempt to turn on the computer you will get a boot disk error when the HDD is read and cannot match up to the new system. By installing Windows on it again you essentially wipe the HDD so any data you have on it is lost, so if you have anything important save it to a CD first.

When you turn on the computer you will need to press Del to bring up the bios (many just spam the Del key until they get to Bios screen). In there you need to change the Boot sequence. This is fairly easy to identify, one of the pages will have a list of your CD Drive and HDD and Floppy as boot drives. You just need to change the order to Boot from CD Drive first instead of HDD (if you do not do this, your old HDD will keep trying to boot the computer and tell you there is an error). Once that is change you save and exit. You need to have the Windows CD in the CD Drive and it will boot from that allowing you to install it on the HDD.

The snap Heatsinks are horrible especially for a first time builder for the very reason you have stated - you do put an uncomfortable amount of pressure in order to snap it into place (usually the first 2 or 3 corners go in easy and the 4th requires more pressure than you feel comfortable giving) but this is normal and should be no issue

 

[spiralizer]

Thank you very much for your response! So, are you saying that I should:

1. remove old drives
2. install in new machine
3. use BIOS to have my CD drive boot first
4. install windows on old HDD

So I don't have to wipe the drive at all? If i'm reading that correctly, that is awesome.

One additional thought on the HDD/ CD drive thing....Both are pretty old (but still work fine). They are IDE or whatever that ribbon-like cable is called. The cable seems to have 3 connections. 1 at the top, 1 middle and 1 that hooks into the mobo. I have read some stuff about setting slaves and masters....do I have to do that?

Thanks again! I really appriciate the help!

 

[asteldian]

Correct.
By installing Windows on your old HDD it wipes the informatin currently on it, so you do not need to do a seperate process first to 'clean' the drive. Just remember, all data will be lost.

It has been a long while since I dealth with IDE, but no, I beleive there is no need to set slave and master - that is for when you have more than one HDD and need the 'Master' to be primary drive that is read while the other acts as a slave. With one HDD it should not be a problem (someone correct me if I am wrong, its been awhile)

You may need to check your motherboard - does it even have 2 x IDE slots? I know mine doesn't. If this is the case you may need to at least buy a SATA DVD Drive (about $18)

 

[spiralizer]

Best answer selected by spiralizer.