The title says it all. I can't isntall Solaris Nevada b55 off of an USB DVD drive. It pops right up in grub and I'm pretty sure it hasn't been able to see the USB 2.0 stuff at all. How, you ask? My USB keyboard does not work at all. My PS/2 one does.

My options are simple: figure out how to get it to netboot, figure out how to fix grub's probing for the USB 2.0 (see this article [osol-help] Re: Install Nevada from External DVD Drive or Thread: grub command to install build 49 x86), or live with an internal drive for a little bit. I've had to go down that last path plenty of times for earlier versions of Linux and FreeBSD.

I think I would rather help Jurgen get his fix either back into Solaris Nevada than go down that path myself. Time to add the internal DVD drive for a little while.

I'm waiting to install Solaris b55 on the new box. I've installed a majority of the functionality I need on WinXP. I installed the drivers and such first. Then I installed the virus scanner. That all went pretty quickly. But right now it is taking forever and a day to install the HP software to connect with my HP Officejet 7200. I haven't done the visit to update WinXP - that can happen overnight.

One thing which was really critical for me was to be able to take not only my bookmarks, which had to include my bookmarks toolbar folder, but also my saved passwords from different web sites. I could have gone looking for this on google.com, but I decided to try an experiment first. My home directory at work is exported via NFS. It has a mozilla directory which contains my profile. It doesn't matter which machine I log in from, I get the same settings.

I looked under Application Data under my user account and found the Mozilla directory. I then copied that over to the Shared Documents directory on the new machine. (It has a name, I'm just not sure if I'm going to keep it.) Note, you have to be out of Firefox to do this step. Otherwise it will complain that the directory is in use.

I then went to the machine and looked for an Application Data folder under my user account and couldn't find one. I assumed it hadn't been created yet. So I made a new folder and tried to rename it as Application Data. The system would not let me, the file already existed. That told me that it was a hidden folder. I went into the view mode and told it to allow me to see hidden folders.

I then copied the Mozilla directory into place. I started up IE to get a new copy of Firefox. I found out there had been a bug which kept you from seeing your bookmarks after an upgrade to 2.0 (which I had hit before). The update had the fix. So I installed it, made Firefox be my default. And of course, all of my bookmarks and passwords were available to me. My history as well, which was a bonus.

Now I need to copy over my Thunderbird configurations. Okay, done! Sweet, sweet!

And now my start menu shows a functional browser and mail client on the Start Menu.

Once I get putty and pscp over on it, the majority of what I want is there. Most of my data resides on the linux box or is already backed up. I'll need to make sure that I get my Steam account migrated. It might also be faster to get the software over there by a straight copy. I can do via USB HD.

I'm installing the copy of Nero that came with the Sony 810UL and once that is done, I'll reboot into the Solaris installation.

Okay, if I had added an internal DVD drive, the system would have booted the first time. As it was, I needed to pop into the BIOS and tell it to boot from USB.

The system is louder than I want. I know it will quiet down once I add the sides, but whoa, it just quieted way down. Screw, that must have been either the drives or the USB DVD player. I don't think it is normally that loud.

Well, the good news, if you want to view it that way, is that it is the DVD drive. Normally it is quiet. But it is also on the floor.

I created a 25G partition on the 200G HD. I'll give most of the rest to Solaris and also have another partition for games, etc. I also want to use that space for perhaps playing with VMware.

Okay, it actually took longer to find a free mouse than it did to hook up the monitor. Here we can see the system in all of its glory:

The USB DVD drive is a Sony 810UL and is pretty slick. It doesn't have any OS inside just yet. The monitor is my Dell 2005FPW. And the keyboard is by Sun (space bar sticks, but that was my fault for dropping it).

I've got the spare parts from wont sitting in the bottom of this kitchen island thing I got from Lowes or Home Depot. It has wheels and a handle to hang cables on.

But anyway, I picked up the chamber fan and realized I suddenly had two of them. I realized one was from the P180 from last year:

Looks like Antec really streamlined them a bit.

I also had a rattling in the case. I was afraid I was going to have to pull everything apart. Note that this was the first time I've stood the unit on its bottom since I added the motherboard. It turns out that as best I can figure, the extra thumbscrew from the sata cage from the other machine got dropped in. I distinctly remember a metallic sound as I moved it earlier, so I know it happened after the memory test. Hmm, I should have looked for it back then.

I've booted the system and you can see that the rear fan has not spun up. You can also see that the tri-controller from the top fan is about to get wedged in it.

The cooler fan had also not spun up, but that might have been due to the bios. The ATA ribbon cable might have also been in the way.

Finally, you can see the ouput on the screen from the PCI devices listing:

It has been there for the last 10 minutes. I know I don't have an OS in the USB DVD and I don't know if the BIOS is configured to boot from it anyway.

But the machine is much farther along than wont was last year. I'm tempted to call it will, as opposed to wont. Pig Will and Pig Wont were characters in Richard Scarry's books. Here is a link to Richard Scarry's Pig Will and Pig Won't (A Knee-High Book(R)) (Hardcover). As can be expected they acted like their names. I used to have a matched pair of AMD K6s based Frankenstein boxes which I used for testing at home.

I'm off to explore the BIOS and get WinXP installed. Once that is done, I'll install Solaris Nevada b55 to have a dual boot system. The first is for games and the second is for real fun.

Time to connect the modular power system and finish up the cabling of the entire system. Okay, we pull out the power cables:

At first I was not happy with the Seasonic manual, you can see the extent of the pictures in the above shot. But it really had everything you needed right there. So in the end I was happy with it. The other concern I had was the thought of having to run 4 sata power cables. For some reason I thought I saw them 1 connector per cable. I remembered that the Thermaltake PSU in wont had a daisy chain. But it was not modular.

We can get to that concern later, first I want to get the PCI Express power installed. You can see that the PSU has nothing connected:

The first attachement is the PCI Express harness. Note that there are two cables, which is meant to support SLI mode. For right now, it means that we will have an extra cable floating about in there. The PCI Express cables have to go on the top - they have a different PSU connector than the other cables.

We can also see that XFX card was easily connected to the other end of the cable. One worry down.

I stretched the cable out that goes to standard 4 prong connectors. You can see that it has 3 connectors on it. It is pretty long:

It is kinda hard to see that it is connected here:

Note that I've routed all of the cables through the chamber lock. The chaos starts to be seen when we look at where the three connectors went:

One went to the PCI connector on the motherboard. This is designed to provide extra power to the PCI express cards. I've got power to spare and I want it connected from the start. The other two went to the case fans. Without the cooling tower, we might have been able to do some cable clustering. But with it in and the PSU being below the motherboard, that isn't very plausible.

I was thrown for a loop for a couple of minutes. I found an extra connector waiting to be attached:

I couldn't figure out where it was coming from until I realized it was the eSata power I was not going to connect. Phew!

Here you can see the second cable run. This one connects the HD power and leaves a spare 4 prong connector. This will eventually go to the lower chamber fan. I won't add it back in until I know that Solaris is going to handle the sata drives. I.e., I'll add it back in right before I suit the case up.

Speaking of sata, here is that cable I was looking for - I found a 2 connector version and was kinda stoked. When I found the 4 connector daisy chain, I was in heaven.

Here I am being clever and threading the cable from the cage to the upper chamber:

And here I am threading it back into the lower chamber:

And here is the completed PSU for this system. Great.

We can pull the sata cage out to easily get to the drives.

All four data cables are easy to connect. Note that they are brought in from the lower chamber.

It was at this point I realized it would be easier to pull the power cable out of the chambers and attach it directly to the cage first.

The data cables had more play than the power cable. It was real easy to connect out of the system. The cage then easily went back in the case:

Here we can see the real final version of the PSU connections:

And here we can see the chaotic mess in full effect:

Note that the system is basically done. Also note the power cables strung outside the box. These are the extra ones. I won't have room down in the lower chamber once I put the fan back in. Plus this way they are out of harm's way during the build.

At this point I'm 3 minutes away from booting up. The majority of that time is getting a monitor in place.

Oh, by the way, the case fans have 3 states. Antec tells you in the manual the default states. Don't count on the fans being in those states. You need to check them. Also, I remember from last year that the state cables can drift into the fans, stopping them. If you look at the last picture, in the lower left hand side, you can see 2 white cables coming out of the fans. While they are pretty stiff, you will want to make sure they can not fall into one of the other fans.

The next thing to do is to connect the CPU cooler fan to the motherboard. I should have done it earlier - before the graphics card but after finding the memory problem. Like I had that planned.

We can see the connector at the bottom of the cooler:

That is a real tight fit, especially with big hands and a video card in the way. The video card can come out. Remember, if it is easy to back something out to make a correct fix, then we should do it. The power is connected and we can see that the card is out:

Now it is time to add the eSata bracket:

I had a choice of whether to try blocking the 2nd PCI express slot or not. I don't plan in running in SLI mode, but I want to leave an option open to add a cooler fan right there. So I've decided to put the bracket between the CPU cooler and the video card.

I've decided that I'm not going to connect the power for the bracket. That 4 pin connector is not capped. As you can see, it looks easy enough to create a short across it as you are looking to connect an external cable:

I'll look for a cap, I seem to remember having some in the past. But until then, I'm just going to connect the sata internally. Also, I have no idea if whatever external sata I connect will have its own power supply or not.

So here we can see the 'L' bend in the sata connector head:

The motherboard has 8 sata connectors. I had planned on using another two for this board, but because of putting it on the outside of the graphics card, I'm using another set. I'm not sure this loop is good for a sata cable, but there is too much play in the cables:

I'm sticking to not installing an internal DVD/CDROM drive. I might have done so if the Gigabyte S5 had a second ATA connector, but it doesn't. I don't want the DVD on the same loop as the primary hard drive. Anyway, the cable has a notch to insure it goes in correctly:

And in it goes pretty easily. Again, you have to push to get it to stay. This cable seems better than the ones MSI supplied last year.

Now we need to mount the hard drive. I've decided to use the ATA/133 drive I have laying about. I'll just connect it to the ATA/100 on the S5. Note I have the option of adding my ATA/133 controller to one of the PCI slots, but I don't want to burn one yet.

The cage comes out by unscrewing the thumbscrew on the right:

Then you pull it out by the tab:

There is a tool box on the back of this cage. With the P180 I got for wont, all of the screws had been stored in here. I remember that had been a pain to find. This time, the screws were easy to find. When I'm about to close the case up, I'll put the screws in here. That way I'll have them when I need them.

The holder slides right out. You can see the white pads already:

These are gel pads and designed to cushion the hard drive. This has the effect of reducing noise from the case. When I bought my first Antec P180, I went over my budget - I was looking for enough drive bays to hold 5 internal 3.5" drives and a DVD drive. I had to pay for that. But I also had a budget for gel cushions for those drives. I ended up saving money by not having to buy them. Thanks Antec!

So we check to make sure that the drive jumpers are correct (cable select in this case) and align it up with the gel pads. The ATA and power connectors have to face out, and that means by the exposed rail connectors. Then we need to mount the drive by screwing it on.

Antec supplies some screws designed to connect through the gel pads. You can see that they are longer and have a wide collar:

Here you can see the first one resting inside a gel pad.

Get them all on loosely and then tighten them up. I get them as tight as if the pads were not there and I was connecting normal drive screws. You can see that the gel is compressed here:

We slide the sled back into the cage:

And then we screw the cage back in:

We connect the cable and use a flashlight again to check for a correct and snug connection.

Now I'm going to be lazy and not take all of the sata drives out of the cage I had them in when wont was mine and not my son's computer:

It is the same cage after all! These drives are mounted from the side. You can see the gel pads and the drive separation here:

We can slide the cage into the case. And yeah, it is the same cage frame after all. Notice that I haven't screwed the cage in yet. I happen to know connecting the sata data cables and power cables is going to be a real pain. Last year I accidently pulled a connector off of a drive.

I've connected the four cables to a set of connectors clumped together. The manual isn't very forthcomming about the difference, if any, amoungst the eight connectors.

Next I string the cables into the drive cage area, but I don't connect them to the drives:

I will not do that until I get the power cables over to the drives. Now it looks like you can just run them straight through, but a case fan goes there. I'm going to wait to get the power strung until I go ahead to connect everything in this cage. I remember lifting it in and out many times in the previous P180 assembly.

By the way, I do not plan on using the raid controller on the motherboard. I do not plan to let WinXP have use of these drives and I'm going to trust RaidZ under ZFS to take care of things. When I configure that, if Sun tells me to enable the raid controller, I'll do so. But I think raidz can handle it.

I'm going to cut this off here. Each blog entry is taking much longer than the actual build phases. I want to keep the power supply connections for their own entry. But once I add them, the system is ready for a real boot test. I should be able to get to the BIOS screen. And then we start to install WinXP over USB. It might be slow, but it only needs to be done once.

I'll have to spend a some time behind the scenes getting a monitor next to the case and also some other minor prep work.

Time to add the video card. First I pulled the power cable up over the cooler:

Then we need to remove the slot bracket from the case:

Just eyeball which has to go and be prepared to remove another if needed - no biggie. Hmm, I decided to just pull the ATX_12V_2X cable instead of fighting it during the install of the card:

Now the card is seated. At this point I got out a flashlight to make sure the connections were solid. I don't have a good angle and the lighting contrast isn't helping. But it looks good:

Another thing I noticed about now is that I probably added the CPU cooler fan incorrectly. If you look at the wire holders, they are both pointing in the same direction. The one on the left should probably bend the other way - it might be upside down. This isn't a major issue and given the issues I've had getting the fans on these cooler towers, I'm not inclined to fix it.

Problems happen when building your own system. You have to remain calm and take the time to fix them correctly. With the memory issue earlier, I knew what had to be happening. Instead of trying to force the sticks with cooler in the way, I removed the cooler. Just take the extra time to fix it correctly.

And if something like this fastner is not done correctly, decide whether doing it right is something you really want to do. It turns out the one on the left is correct and the one on the right is incorrect. If I had rushed in to change the one on the left, I might have gotten more frustrated. This issue is not worth it for me to fix - the fan is connected and will work.

Back to the graphics card - time for us to add the power cable back to the ATX_12V_2X connector. And we can see now that we do have plenty of room for it:

Time to screw the card down onto the case. If the card is seated correctly, you shouldn't have to adjust the bracket too much. I didn't have to at all (didn't capture this), and you can see the screw here:

Next we can see the connectors on the back of the case:

Finally, I've done everything that the motherboard manual has suggested - time to check the card's manual. Well, it states that if the optional power cables are provided, we should connect them. There were no cables. Is there a power connector? Yes:

You can see it just above the vee caused by the two cables. It looks like it is expecting a cable with 6 connectors. Now I'm not going to worry about whether I need this or not just yet. I figure either the power supply will have the needed cable or I'll do some research as to whether I need it or not. Well, it turns out a quick look at the M12 manual shows that the cable is provided.

We are really close to the end. We need to add the drives and connect up the remaining power cables. Also, the Gigabyte comes with an ESATA bracket. I want to go ahead and get that installed as well.

Okay, we are close to putting on the finishing touches and getting to the OS installs. But before we get to that, I want to test that the power works and show off how well the boot board works. We pop those caps, and add the ATX power:

We also add the ATX_12V_2X connector.

Now it snapped on and the ATX did not. I tried to capture a little gap here on the ATX:

But I didn't get it in focus. Anyway, I played with the connector a bit until I felt it sat better.

How do the power cables run in the case? Remember I'm worried about the play in the ATX_12V_2X cable. It looks like it has enough to go over the video card. But you can see that the two cables are crossed as they come into the upper chamber:

The ATX_12V_2X cable is easier to disconnect and uncross:

Okay, at this point we have CPU, memory, and power. We can test the boot board. Remember, the expected output of the boot board will be some code to the effect that the video card is missing. Also, remember my quip about foreshadowing.

I bought the board at CompUSA last year to help triage my boot problems with wont. It is easy to install, it just takes up a PCI slot. By the way, the MSI motherboard for wont only had one pci slot and I couldn't get the PCI Express video working. So when I added a dirt cheap PCI video card, I couldn't test anymore with the boot card. Anyway, here it is in the system:

We need to add a power cable and bring the system up:

The lack of hard drive and DVD/CDROM should not be worrying. Basically we are doing a sanity check as to whether the system will power up. We could have done all of this on a static mat.

Anyway, the external 2 digit POST code display shows C1:

So does the one on board. The power LEDs also show that the system power is okay. I'm just going to show the board code display - it is easier to capture with a camera. But the other one is easier to see while debugging.

Anyway, C1 turns out to not be what I was expecting. It states that there is a problem with memory. At this point all I can think of is the issue installing the first stick under the Scythe cooler. I looked at the sticks and the left side of both of them do not look fully engaged with the locking levers. So off comes the Scythe - it is the lesser of all evils in my mind. I'm not getting those memory sticks seated properly with it on.

When I get the cooler off, I can see that I had added just enough thermal paste yesterday on the CPU:

Looks like a good layer on the cooler dock as well:

Now I'm really sorry I don't have a picture of the memory at this point. The card on the camera got full and when I got back, I thought I had captured the moment. But anyway, the first stick was definitely not seated on the left side. You could easily see the connector leads. I got a nice satisfying click when I reseated both sticks. You can see them seated correctly here:

After I reconnected the cooler and powered up the system, the boot card sticks on FF:

It went past the memory check, you could easily see it posting different codes. This code signifies that it is trying to boot. I can live with that for right now.

Clearly I showed that the motherboard is working at trying to bring up the system. I found a crucial build error earlier than normal and I fixed it. I also showed the utility of having a boot board. As much as I love the Antec P180s, they do not have cheap PC speakers. I actually have some, but reading boot codes is much easier than deciphering beeps for me.

Another big plus is that the PSU is dead quiet. I didn't realize this at first, but I had no clue the system was on just by listening. None of the case fans (or the cooler fan) were on, but I still don't expect to hear much. When I brought up wont last year, the CPU fans supplied for the MSI K8N Master2-FAR were loud. This experience was much sweeter.

I noted that the power connectors had some black caps on them:

I've been worrying slightly about this - the power supply's cables will require the caps to come off for the ATX power connector (shown above). For the ATX_12V_2X connector, I have a choice of using one of two cables, one which would require taking the cap off.

If I haven't mentioned, I really like Gigabyte's manual. Besides the manual, it comes with a glossy Hardware Installation Guide. It doesn't mention the caps. I think the guide is slightly outdated, perhaps for the previous generation of motherboard, which just had the ATX_12V power connector.

In any event, the manual does discuss the caps (page 25) and states that if your cable connectors do not support a 24 pin ATX or 2x4 ATX_12V power connector, leave the caps on. I like that little details like this are covered.