Scott Hanselman and Jeff Atwood have been slowly building up a new development rig for Scott over the past month or so with Jeff giving blow by blow commentary on how he's put it together, tips and so on. It's a pretty good set of posts to read should you ever want to build your own.

I've used my work laptop exclusively for the last five months as my old PC was cannibalized into a subversion server for co-hosting over at Dave's. But, having built that one and with half a computer still lying around in bits, I decided that now was the time to redress that and started looking around. I came back with this setup. The stuff I bought new is in italics

  • Abit Fatal1ty Fp-IN9 SLI Moboblackbird
  • Core 2 Quad 6600
  • Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
  • 4GB Corsair QuadX XMS2 DDR2 PC2-6400 (800)
  • Western Digital Raptor 73GB SATA HD (OS Drive)
  • Lite-on SATA DVD\RW Dual-layer
  • 2* XFX GeForce 8400GS PCIe
  • Abit PCIe wireless card
  • 2* 160GB HDs in RAID 1 (Data)
  • Floppy drive
  • SR-71 Blackbird case
  • Sound Blaster X-Fi ExtremeMusic

Bearing in mind that I blew up a motherboard when I built the machine originally because I didn't know to use the spacers to fix it to the back plate (it makes a really loud pop when you do), it was really disappointing to see that the motherboard came with no screws or spacers at all. Fortunately, I still had those from the previous build, but this mobo came without a parts list: If you think something is missing from the mobo kit you've bought, take it back and ask. Don't be impatient and blow it up. This said, Jeff's basic build guide is pretty good. I'd add a few more doses of common sense here as well.

  • If you're reusing a case or old components, take the time before building to take everything out and remove as much dirt and dust as you can. You might not look in it again for a couple of years, but you wouldn't leave your house that long with out cleaning would you?
  • Do have access to a still live computer in case something goes wrong and you need to look up a solution, or build a driver disk / bootable USB stick. (here's the utility to make one bootable btw)
  • (I hear groans already for this one). A USB floppy drive can be a godsend. Vista and some mobos now understand what a bootable USB stick is and how to deal with one, but not all. Besides, that assumes you actually want to install Vista, doesn't it?

This time around, my system POSTed first time and things looked good. I put in the minimum hardware needed to install Vista x64 (memory, dvd drive, OS hard drive), set the DVD to boot first and waited. Vista expanded some files, then rebooted to continue the installation from the hard drive, loaded the core system drivers and then POW. A blue screen of death appeared for half a second and then the machine rebooted again with the rebooting and BSoD continuing ad infinitum.

A fair amount of cold sweat, swearing and uttering "Why me?" occurred at this point. And understandable. Some piece of hardware is now not working but how do you find out? Well, keeping the mantra of Douglas Adams in mind, I tried not to panic.

  • Look at the manufacturer's website and see if you're running the latest BIOS for your particular mobo. It might not support your CPU or even be WHQL'd for your operating system. My FP-IN9 for instance came loaded with rev11 of the BIOS. According to abit.com, it wasn't certified for Vista until rev12, so I updated to rev14. (alas i still got BSoDs after the update and another install attempt)
  • Whether you're using RAID or not for your OS disk, if you're using SATA disks, you might want to try reinstalling the OS again and loading the SATA RAID controller drivers for the mobo during install. For non-Vista \ Longhorn versions of Windows, this means pressing F6 when install files are initially being loaded and you're prompted to do so by the installer. The CD that comes with the mobo usually has an application to generate a floppy with the right drivers on it. Failing that, the mobo manufacturer's website will have the latest versions of the drivers for download and instructions on how to build the floppy \ USB stick if you're using Vista. In my case, I got the latest nForce drivers from nVidia's website. Annoyingly, the Vista installer failed to acknowledge that any of the SATA RAID drivers I had downloaded were actually correct for my mobo so there was no joy there. It later turned out that Vista already has drivers for the SATA RAID controller on nForce 650 SLI boards anyway - they are the same as those for nForce 430 boards. But who knew? And I was still getting BSoDs.

At this point, I turned to people with greater knowledge than I, ringing friends and posting the situation to a number of hardware forums. In my case, I posted to

Within a few hours, I had several new courses of action, which make a lot of sense in hindsight but if you've not been in the situation before aren't quite as apparent.

  • Test your memory. Despite the BSoD appearing when it did, several suggestions were to make sure the memory installed was sound using MemTest. This is a standalone program that boots from a CD and stress tests all your installed memory. Memory modules are more likely to be bad when purchased new than hard drives. It's also completely automatic and straightforward to follow. You can download it as an ISO for a bootable CDROM, an EXE for a bootable USB stick or a package for a floppy disk. (My memory showed no errors after running memtest five times, so I crossed that off the list)
  • Test your hard drive. There are several small and fragile things in a hard drive. Despite tests to show that it takes ages for them to wear out, it doesn't mean that a read head or platter isn't knackered from the offset, so boot to DOS and try running chkdsk and see what it says. Correct any errors if there are any and try again. (Still BSoDding although once with a DOS-based error saying disk read error. Still think its my HD)

Humph, still no luck. More suggestions came from the forums.

  • Another suggestion was to download a LiveCD and run more tests against the hardware. If you've not come across these before, a LiveCD is a copy of an OS which runs straight from CD or DVD without any interaction from the hard drive. (More on wikipedia about them here.) There are quite a lot of them for different Linux variants, but I prefer Windows and found the not-shy-about-it ultimate boot cd for windows. The maintainers of this freeware app create a script that combines your Windows CD files with a number of their own to create a Windows LiveCD populated with lots of diagnostic tools, backup and imaging tools to use. I created one and ran HDTune. Again, no problems. Not the HD then, but still with the BSoDs.
  • Try the Microsoft knowledgebase. This one is a bit harder because the KB works best if you know the right question to ask first. After several different searches I found Error message when you try to install Windows Vista on a computer that uses more than 3 GB of RAM: "STOP 0x0000000A" wherein Vista fails to install on certain combinations of completely healthy hardware and more than 3GB of RAM. Solution? Install Vista with 2GB of RAM in our box, apply update and then put the rest of your memory back in the box. Yup - that worked for me. I pray it'll be fixed for Vista SP1 or Server 2008.

It's worth noting that there were many threads from users saying that KB929777 didn't work for them but it did for me and Vista x64 is now beaming down at me.

So then, if you are building your own PC and things don't go exactly how you might expect them to, don't panic too much and work through the problem systematically, much as you would a software bug.

  • Be prepared for problems before you start building with a few tools on a bootable floppy, CD or USB stick. Or if you prefer, download and create a LiveCD or LiveDVD with diagnostic tools on it. Murphy's law will ensure that no problems occur because of your preparation, but if they do then...
  • Replicate the problem with as few components as possible in your system.
  • Test them as best you can.
  • Ask others for help on hardware forums. Chances are that yours is not a unique problem.
  • If all your hardware checks out, look for software issues.

Hope that helps.