Nublet questions - some missing and questionable connectors?

[tierasan]

Hi all,

I'm new to building a computer but decided to give it a shot...I'm extremely horrified that I've made some terrible mistakes and everything will go wrong when I turn the thing on (have yet to press the power button!) These may be stupid questions, but I seriously have no idea whether something is wrong or not...:(

I have 4 questions:
1) Are there typically connectors supplied with chassis/MB that connect the audio output from the CD drive to the mother board?? Because I don't think I got one and I'm wondering whether I need to buy one? My MB is Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 ATX LGA775 Conroe P965 DDR2 PCI-E16 3PCI-E1 3PCI SATA2 GBLAN Audio Motherboard. My chassis is Nmedia HTPC-300BA Media Centre Tower Case ATX Black 1X5.25 4X3.5INT Front Audio USB Firewi *IR-$3*

2) My chassis has this weird thing at the back and I have no idea what it plugs into. You can see it kind of in this picture:
http://img.ncix.com/images/18912_C.jpg
It's that gray wire at the back panel, lower left of this image...on the inside it seems to have a 4hole (or maybe 3 hole? I'm not in front of my chassis right now) connector into something which I don't konw what. On the outside, it seems to have a port for audio input, perhaps.

Secondly, my chassis has this white wire that's marked as 'AUDIO BIAS' coming out of the bundle of wires that go into F-Audio. I found out where to plug the rest of the wires (ie mic left right etc..), but I have no idea where the white one goes into. Any idea what this audio bias thing is?

3) Are white wires usually negative? Because my pwr and reset wires (the ones with two-holes) from the chassis are not marked with which is positive and negative...my mother board seems to have the holes arranged such that the pwr and reset wires go in together but with the labels are back to back.

The pins are arranged as follows:
[pwr+][reset- ]
[pwr- ][reset+]

The wires are arranged as follows:

Pwr:
[white] <---label on this side
[colored]

Reset:
[white] <---- label on this side
[colored]

So as you can see, once you plug this in, the labels are facing each other, and intuitively this strikes me as wrong!

4) I may have accidently allowed a screw to drop onto the mother board once by accident during installation :( As well, I think one of the power supply wires brushed against it (they are so long!). What are the chances that I've ruined the board?

Sorry if these are trivial questions, and thank you so much to whoever reads this for your time and patience! I'm a poor student so I can't afford for this thing to blow up on me :o

[Cricket]

I have 4 questions:
1) Are there typically connectors supplied with chassis/MB that connect the audio output from the CD drive to the mother board?? Because I don't think I got one and I'm wondering whether I need to buy one?You don't need it. The audio signal is carried through the data cable now, so as long as the optical drive is connected to the motherboard you'll get audio through your speakers.) My chassis has this weird thing at the back and I have no idea what it plugs into. It's that gray wire at the back panel, lower left of this image...on the inside it seems to have a 4hole (or maybe 3 hole? I'm not in front of my chassis right now) connector into something which I don't konw what. On the outside, it seems to have a port for audio input, perhaps.Without seeing the outer plate of that dongle we'd only be guessing as to what that could be for.Secondly, my chassis has this white wire that's marked as 'AUDIO BIAS' coming out of the bundle of wires that go into F-Audio. I found out where to plug the rest of the wires (ie mic left right etc..), but I have no idea where the white one goes into. Any idea what this audio bias thing is? Sorry, can't help you with this.3) Are white wires usually negative? Because my pwr and reset wires (the ones with two-holes) from the chassis are not marked with which is positive and negative...my mother board seems to have the holes arranged such that the pwr and reset wires go in together but with the labels are back to back.

The pins are arranged as follows:
[pwr+][reset- ]
[pwr- ][reset+]

The wires are arranged as follows:

Pwr:
[white] <---label on this side
[colored]

Reset:
[white] <---- label on this side
[colored]

So as you can see, once you plug this in, the labels are facing each other, and intuitively this strikes me as wrong! The power and reset connectors don't have polarity...you can connect them either way and the switches will still work. For the PWR and HDD LEDs you have to install the connector the right way or the LED won't work. The colored wire is usually positive and the white wire is usually ground...but if that doesn't work just flip the connector 180 degrees.4) I may have accidently allowed a screw to drop onto the mother board once by accident during installation :( As well, I think one of the power supply wires brushed against it (they are so long!). What are the chances that I've ruined the board?Don't worry, I doubt you've damaged the motherboard. I've dropped screws onto motherboards dozens of times in the past and the motherboards all worked after.

:) Cricket

[tierasan]

great thanks so much! I will take a picture of the dongle perhaps and post it here later when I get home

[tierasan]

Okay cool so it's actually on and working! That little dongle thing was an S/PDIF which I found a place to plug into on the mother board. So that's that. Temperatures at bios are system 40 degrees and processor 33 degrees. I'm still messing around with the bios but I'm hoping to install windows....unfortunately, I seem to get a message saying
"Disk boot error. Please insert system disk and press enter"...
Any ideas? I have this nasty feeling my dvdrom drive isn't being picked up by the system....

[whubbard]

make sure it is the 1st boot device in the BIOS. also make sure the CD isn't scratched :(

[tierasan]

Yeah I've set the 1st boot device on the bios to be cdrom...and the dvd is definitely not scratched (just took it out of the package)...it is windows vista. Is there some sort of preparation I need to do?

Oh yeah, and when I'm configuring BIOS, for IDE drives, I only see my SATA hard drive showing up...shouldn't my dvd drive be there??

[BeepBeep2]

yes, it very well should be. check all your connectors to the drive and the motherboard and if anything is loose or if you notice anything post it...i installed windows vista home premium on my first build 3 weeks ago. i've done my reading for about 2 years...

[tierasan]

fantastic...my cable was lose -_-; thank you thank you! I will keep you all updated on how things go....hopefully everything will go smoothly from now on. Again thanks again!

[BeepBeep2]

your welcome and i hope the build goes well!

[tierasan]

Well thanks to everyone who helped me out! Everything seems to be up and running, including my wireless network card and windows...temperature hovers around 36-37C which seems reasonable to me...despite my earlier thermal paste crisis. I am shocked and amazed that this thing is working. I may have to readjust some of the wires because when I opened it last time, I saw one of them touching that gold heat grid thing on the mother board :S That would have been bad. But yeah, thanks again for the help!! I've sucessfully built my first system!

[whubbard]

Congrats, enjoy the build

[Cricket]

Well thanks to everyone who helped me out! Everything seems to be up and running, including my wireless network card and windows..Congrats on successfully completing your first build.temperature hovers around 36-37C which seems reasonable to me...despite my earlier thermal paste crisis.Those temps are just fine.I may have to readjust some of the wires because when I opened it last time, I saw one of them touching that gold heat grid thing on the mother board :S That would have been bad."Gold heat grid thing"? The chipset heatsinks? It's okay if a insulated wire touches those, nothing bad will happen.I've sucessfully built my first system!Are you planning your second system already? ;)

:) Cricket

[tierasan]

Thanks for all the encouragement! I nearly burned myself on the chipset heatsink a few days ago..probably should have waited for the system to cool down completely before opening it up. I bet there are all sorts of bad things that can happen if you don't! Luckily nothing bad happened and I am now typing this msg on my new computer! The temperatures now go up to around 100F (never more) when I'm playing games/installing things, so I guess that's alright! I'm still really paranoid at the slightest thing...for instance, it was clicking continuously for about 10 minutes today and I was sooo worried something was stuck in the fan, or the hard drive was failing...but then it stopped and hasn't started since so I assume it's just windows running some update program in the background!

Anyway, thanks again for all the help..it's been tremendously fun and I've learned alot! I don't think I'll be buying prebuilt computers for a long time! :)

[Cricket]

I don't think I'll be buying prebuilt computers for a long time! :)I'm sure you won't. I bought my last name brand computer back in 1995. I built my first computer in 1997 and haven't looked at another name brand computer since.

:) Cricket