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noob system build questions

P

prelip

Junior Member
I've just put together my first system. I have 3 questions.

First, after I fired it up and entered the cmos I found that my DVD burner is my IDE Primary Master and my HD is my IDE Third Master. Does this matter? I realize that I hooked up my DVD drive to the IDE Controller #1 so I know the result seems obvious but I guess I don't understand how the SATA connection works into the equation.

Second, should my next step be to format/partition my hard drive? And can I do that from my windows xp cd? (don't have a floppy drive)

Third, was wondering what a safe cpu/system temp is? I tried to find this myself on amd's website but was unable to find it.

Please forgive any stupid questions, but hey I'm new at this.
Thanks for any help.



AMD Athlon 64 3500+
eVGA GeForce 6800
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum nForce3
Seagate Barracuda 160GB Serial ATA 7200RPM
Sony DWD22A Double Layer DVD±RW
Corsair 512MBx2 DDR400 PC3200
Zalman ZM400A-APF 400W
Antec P160 Case
 
Welcome to the Forums 🙂 For your situation, yeah, just throw your Windows CD in there and you ought to be able to boot from it, partition the hard drive during Windows Setup (you'll see where), and format the partition and carry on. After Windows Setup makes its first reboot, you might need to go into the motherboard's BIOS menus and ensure that the SATA drive is among the bootable devices, or it might skip over it.

Be aware that if your Windows CD doesn't have Service Pack 2 already integrated, then your fresh Windows installation would be vulnerable to direct attack by worms as soon as your onboard network adapter began to function, unless you had a firewall in place. The firewall could be the built-in Windows firewall (which you must turn on yourself, pre-SP2), or ZoneAlarm, or a hardware firewall in a router. But you want firewall protection. I made a page intended to help people get through this initial vulnerable condition, here. Also look at the Ongoing prevention tips below that wormproofing part.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. Are you talking about boot priority (basic cmos) or are you talking about the Hard Disk Boot Priority (Peripherals). Just wondering if the fact that my HD shows up as IDE Third master will affect this?
 
I haven't worked with that motherboard firsthand, but you might need to just do the one in the basic CMOS since you've got just one hard drive at the moment. If you had more than one, then maybe it would need you to specify which drive as well. Worst-case scenario, a little trial & error will get it figured out 🙂
 
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