At the end of the previous step, you saved your CMOS settings and the system rebooted. You should have had a system disk or CD in the boot drive so that the PC booted itself properly. If you got an error to the effect of “Missing Operating System”, then you likely did not remember to put the system disk into the drive or the system disk is not valid and bootable. If it is not a bootable system disk, you will need to get one before pressing forward. More modern operating systems like Windows XP come with CDs which themselves are bootable, in which case just make sure the CD is in the CD-ROM. If you are still having problems, verify your boot order was set correctly in CMOS in the previous step. Remember, if you are trying to boot from a diskette, your floppy drive must be set as the first boot device. If you want to boot from CD, your CD-ROM must be set as the first boot device.

Assuming you handled that properly, the PC should be up and running and you are either sitting at a command prompt or some other screen dictated by your bootable CD or diskette. Now that the PC is just sitting there running, it is a good time to test a few things before proceeding further. Check the following:

1. Check the LED’s on the front of the case. During boot-up, the HDD LED should light. If it does, it is connected properly to the motherboard. If not, try reversing the leads on the LED plug, or just turning it around. You can also check that the power LED lights and that the turbo LED lights, if it is connected.
2. Check the hard drive. Make sure it is spinning.
3. Check the fans. Make sure the CPU fan, power supply fan, and case fan(if you have one) are all spinning without any wires in the way. If your video card happens to have a fan, make sure it spins freely as well.
4. Make sure the CD-ROM has power by hitting the eject button and seeing if it opens.
5. Hit the reset button to be sure it works. While it reboots, check to be sure all the data on the BIOS splash screen is correct to your system.
6. Let the system run for 10-15 minutes. While it is running, go into your CMOS setup again and go to the PC Health screen so that you can monitor the CPU temperatures while it is running. The purpose in doing this is to ensure that the processor is being adequately cooled and will not lead to instability. If you choose, you can also – CAREFULLY – ground yourself and then reach in and gently touch the sides of the CPU and heat sink as it is running. If the heat sink is lukewarm to the touch (not too hot to touch) then it is doing its job properly. During this testing period, you can just let the PC run for a bit. If, after several minutes, the heat sink gets too hot or the temperature readouts become abnormally high, or if the PC Health screen freezes and you cannot do anything with the keyboard, then you likely have a cooling issue with your processor. You are either running a cooling fan which is not adequate for your processor or there is an issue with inadequate heat transfer between the processor and the heat sink, which means you might need to re-install the processor and do a better job of using heat sink compound this time.

Okay, now that we are pretty sure the hardware portion of this tutorial is a done deal, let’s move into setting your hard disks up.