In an interest to add some new content to the Scarborough Family site I am going to start adding some tech-type content to my posts.  I really don’t plan to make these posts to technical in nature (since I am not that technical) nor do I plan to make them a review of a product.  I merely plan to use these posts as a share point of my experiences, and hopefully they will be entertaining and enlightening.

With that being stated, let’s start on the first post.

I recently purchased all the pieces for a new gaming PC and have finally got it all put together and installed the Win7 Professional 64bit OS.  There were several quirks about this OS installation procedure that I haven’t noticed prior to this.

When I started the install (I was previously running the machine with the Win7 Pro 64bit RC) it went thru the normal loading of setup files after booting from the CD.  I wanted to do a format of my C: because I always like to start with a clean disk when re-installing a Windows OS.  That all went pretty normally except when I selected the drive that I just formatted I kept getting an error message that said:

Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition…

Well after a little searching I found the problem.  You obviously cannot have more than 1 physical drive attached to your system when installing Win7.  I unplugged the second drive and booted the PC back up…that is when all hell broke loose.  I hit the power button to turn it on and I heard a pop, a sizzle and then nothing.  The PC wouldn’t do anything.

I felt like my first puppy had just been killed in front of me.  My heart sank into my ass and my mouth dried up like I had just smoker half a bag of chronic.  I immediately started to panic.  Of course, that is when Jake decided to come in my room and see what I was doing.  Surprisingly, I maintained my calm and asked him to give me a few minutes.

Anyway, I unplugged all connections and starting investigating.  I found nothing, no burnt spots, no smoke smell, absolutely nothing.  Whew!  Then I realized that I had forgotten to unplug the other end of the frickin SATA cable from the mobo.  Now all the panic welled up in me anew.

I unplugged the cable and put the machine back together and luckily it booted up with no problems!  Now, I could get back to the original point of the exercise, which was to re-install the OS.  Once I had that other drive disconnected the install went without a hitch.  I was sitting on the desktop ready to install my security software (AVG Internet Security) within 30 minutes.  Amazing.  It was super-fast and easy to do, once I got past the problem with the drive.

Windows 7 was my idea, but I definitely didn’t ask for install problems with multiple HDD installed.

Stay tuned for the next episode when I detail my horrors with Win7 and getting an iPhone to connect!!!!