loonyblog.

Shuttle headaches.

My game PC has been giving me a lot of trouble lately, and things kept getting worse and worse, so I ultimately decided to just bite the bullet and replace the motherboard. But I couldn't figure out precisely what the problem was...it was either the CPU, the motherboard or the power supply...or possibly all three. After doing the math, and taking a good long look at my beastly game machine's tower, I decided to scale things back a little and go with a nice, compact Shuttle XPC.

I looked over my options and went with the SN85G4v3 (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?). This isn't the most recent XPC, but it is solid, and I wouldn't have to worry about buying a new video card, hard drive or RAM. I did need a new processor, but the AMD 64 3400+ wasn't expensive at all, and I got a good deal on the pair. One thing that I did have to give up was one of my three RAM chips, as the XPC only has two RAM slots. But that's not that big a deal, as I still have a full gig of RAM.

In my previous setup, I had two hard drives: an IDE and an SATA. The SATA was the secondary drive, and about ten times as large. Since the XPC only has room for one internal drive, I decided to ditch the IDE and go with that. That's where the fun began. See, here's the thing. For some baffling reason, Shuttle decided to put an NVIDIA RAID chip on the motherboard. If you're using an IDE drive, that's no big deal. But if you're using a single SATA drive as your main hard drive, you're going to run into problems installing Windows. And I did. I tried repeatedly, each time I through the basic blue screen setup and rebooted to continue, I got this lovely error: "error loading operating system."

Oh the fun.

I did a little hunting around online, and discovered that RAID problem. No biggie, right? Just pop in the driver during setup and...oh, wait. You can't pop in a driver CD during the XP installation. The only way you can add extra RAID or SATA drivers is by inserting a floppy disk. Which Shuttle was kind enough to include in the XPC box, but they kinda forgot one thing: there isn't room in the XPC for a floppy drive. Doh!

So I asked the Shack what to do, and a bunch of people pointed me towards XPCREATE, which lets you create a custom XP install CD. After reading over the directions a bit, and realizing that you need to have an existing Windows installation in order to do it (which I don't have -- I have a Linux box and two Macs, but the game PC is my only Windows machine) I opted for the other way out...I bought a USB floppy drive.

I went with this one from LaCie, since it's at least a little attractive, and I love my FireWire LaCie hard drive. And sure enough, using the floppy drive and the provided disk, it worked. Which is good, because I would probably have killed someone if it hadn't.

I can't realy blame Microsoft for this problem...after all, when XP shipped, floppy drives were still common on PCs (Macs had long been done with them by that point). No, I completely blame Shuttle. Why the heck is there a RAID chip on a motherboard with only room for one hard drive? I guess if you got one of those external SATA adapters you could hook it up, but that seems like an awful lot of work to go through to add a second drive to this thing.

Ah, who cares. What matters now is that the machine is working (I'm writing this on it while it installs Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, actually) and it's nice and snappy. Plus it's about a tenth of the size of my old case, and makes a third as much noise.

Posted by jason at February 19, 2005 01:34 PM | TrackBack | Read more: Geek Culture