My new Shuttle XPC ST61G4
I bought the unit the day before Thanksgiving (11/26/03) from a respectable company, MWAVE.COM, from whom I've bought before, and I loaded my baby with a 3.0 GHz HT P4 CPU, 1 GB DDR400 RAM, and a 160 GB Seagate HDD (7200 RPM, 8 MB buffer). It seemed like a dream come true to have all of this under such a tiny enclosure.
But of course, things didn't work the way I had hoped. I paid an extra $30 on top of the $1000 price tag to get it all assembled and tested for me. Unfortunately, MWAVE does not assemble/test hard disks when you pay that fee, so I was stuck throwing it in myself.
No problem, I figured. I've installed so many disks on so many computers that it shouldn't have been a problem. Shouldn't have...
I'm a pretty good hacker, but I couldn't figure this one out. So, I called up support. I got some guy who had been in the country for about six minutes, who then transferred me to a guy who had been in the country for about six hours. The call was long distance, so I was using my cell phone, but reception was poor and I had no choice but to stay seated: I was holding the hard disk in my hand, attached to the live computer, trying to bring it into the world of the living. It was quite geeky. But it was for a reason: I was trying to feel motion in the disk to see if it was alive. It was.
The techie put me on hold, and a minute later the line disconnected. I called up again, and history repeated itself. I decided to pen a few e-mails to MWAVE demanding that they send a new shipment, fully tested and ready to go. They responded by giving me a few suggestions on how to fix the problem, and some were reasonably OK:
I had to hack open my dormant AMD K6-2 400 MHz Linux box and rip out its floppy drive, since who in the hell has a floppy drive anymore? After finally locating the floppy cable port on the motherboard and getting the drive to work, I wandered down my hall looking for someone with a floppy disk drive and a CD drive on his/her laptop.
Luckily I found someone matching these criteria. I copied over the files as listed above. I rebooted the system, fired up XP installation, hit F6 to load my own drivers, and inserted the floppy disk when it asked me.
Failure. "Please insert the manufacturer disk" it said to me. But I did! Why can't it ask for the CD-ROM?
Hmm, maybe the on-board RAID chip can help. I don't have another disk for RAID, but what the hell. I rebooted and ran the RAID configuration tool. The positive note is that it saw my hard disk, and it even let me reformat it! 2 hours later it finished (160 GB takes a long time I suppose to low-level format).
Again I rebooted hoping to see my disk show up. No deal. Still nothing. XP reports it can't find my disk, and the installation utility crashes when I say it does.
Currently I have no idea what to do. My room looks like a demilitarized zone from my hackings and my baby is still lying dormant, awaiting life.
I will just have to wait to see if the MWAVE staff can help me. I would just like to mention that the reason I paid $30 extra for "assemble/test" at MWAVE is so that they would assemble and test it and I would avoid this entire problem!
But of course it didn't work out well. Things like this never do: something always goes wrong.
Is it possible Serial ATA is not enabled? I can't find the Serial ATA option in the BIOS. The hunt continues.... (Dec 4, 2003)
Stupid Mistakes
For my part, I made a mistake. My floppy drive that I grabbed from my older Linux box worked when I installed Linux on it a few weeks ago. But it wasn't working properly when I did this setup, and that is the reason why it couldn't read the disk. As you can see in this picture below, I had to wire up my working Windows desktop to the Shuttle to get it to use that floppy. I couldn't get the damn floppy out of the Dell because the people at Dell make it damn near impossible to remove parts. I still have its original 20 GB drive laying at the front pane because I could never remove it.
Difficult computer setup. Notice the floppy cable from the desktop to the Shuttle.
Once I was able to get the floppy drive to read the floppy disk, everything starting working correctly!
 1 Starting Windows (after hitting F6) |
 2 Specify RAID |
 3 Insert the Disk with the RAID drivers |
 4 Select the XP RAID driver |
 5 Formatting the SATA drive |
 6 Installing Windows |
Ultimately things worked out around 4:15 a.m. One problem came up but it's not fatal enough to warrant me re-installing from
scratch: since the OnChip RAID was enabled, it figured that the C and D drives were removable RAID and E was
a removable CD/DVD. So my hard disk was assigned to drive F, which is annoying since some programs
are hard-coded for C, but in general hasn't been a problem yet.
One thing to note that's very cool: the onboard multi-disk reader is very useful. I downloaded these pictures to my machine without having to configure my Canon S230 Elph camera at all. Simply stick the card in the slot and Windows will download the images and delete them from the disk. Very useful feature, especially if someone else drops by and wants to download pictures without worrying about toting along a cable.
Radeon 9100 IGP
Also, I was amazed at the poor performance of the onboard Radeon 9100 IGP on the RS300 chipset. I thought it was supposed to be on par with last year's graphics accelerators, but it scored over 2000 points below posted benchmarks. However, this was due to the fact that the system by default only allocated 32 MB to the IGP's frame buffer. I doubled this in the BIOS (under Integrated Peripherals, there is an option for Frame Buffer memory). I could put it up to 128 MB if I want to get the most performance, but until I start playing Half-Life 2 I think it will stay at 64. This is because it eats up my 1 GB primary memory and allocates it entirely for the video card; even though it says "shared" it's really "exclusive."
Anyway, when I doubled the buffer to 64 MB, it met or exceeded the scores posted on the above web page. I thought that the Radeon 9100 would give my system a solid graphics system at a low cost, but for the games coming out nowadays, it won't live up to it. Even lowering my resolution to 640x480 for Day of Defeat sometimes led to unplayable moments. WarCraft 3 played very smoothly and nicely, as did C&C Generals. I have my doubts for Half-Life 2, unless some amazing new drivers come out that fix these performance problems soon!
If I ever do get back into hard-core gaming, though, I will probably go ahead and buy a Radeon 9800 for my 8X AGP slot. Then I will have, in the future, the option to use THREE output devices simultaneously. I can code on one monitor, have e-mail and web in another, and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on an attached TV. While I have no use for this now, it will be useful in the future when my system reaches a stabler level as I work out the kinks. Also, I plan to purchase an ATI HDTV tuner some day in the future as well and use up my 1 free PCI slot. Then I shall a very nice system with such a small footprint.
Colors
The color scheme was a bit off by default. Human faces looked too orange and ill. I fixed this by playing with the color manager under Desktop / Settings / Advanced / Colors. I have to go there each time and click on the "Colors" tab to reset it after reboots; otherwise it's very bright and irregular. Perhaps this is a driver problem that will be resolved in a future update? I hope so!
Dec 28 update: The color issue isn't a problem anymore. I reset my LCD settings and reset the video card color settings, and everything is nice right now. I guess somehow the monitor wasn't calibrated well for the video card. I also switched the window appearance settings to the standard XP blue look, and it looks beautiful now. I still, however, have problems with Explorer and it NOT showing icons:
Dammit! My iPod won't work (Dec 10 2003)
I feared the C drive problem may come back to haunt me other than the occasional poorly coded programs. My iPod won't synch with my machine! Why? I finally found out: If your Windows is installed somewhere other than the C drive, your iPod will not work. Apple, why??? Why hast thou foresaken me? What have I done wrong?
Now, unfortunately, I will have to reinstall Windows, unless I can come up with some clever hack. I tried mounting the C drive as a local network drive, but that didn't seem to work. However, permissions were not properly set (i.e. no write), so it's possible that it needs to write something. I'll give that a whirl. Why can't I just make a bloody symbolic link to F:\ called C:\ ? Damn shortcuts!
System Reinstall: Everything Looks Fine! (Dec 9 2004)
A year has passed since I first went through this painful installation, but I have learned from my mistakes and have moved on. I've learned that Windows XP doesn't include SATA drivers by default (or perhaps not the ones I need). I've learned that if you have a 6-in-1 card-reader (or at least my card-reader) installed and hooked up when you set up the OS, WinXP will place those Removable Storage drives higher on the list of drive letters than your SATA hard disk! Yeah, my SATA drive was F:\ or something! I've also learned that SATA isn't as great as it's cracked up to be, or at least not on this machine.
I've re-installed XP from scratch with a new hard disk, a 200 GB Seagate that's fast and very quiet. I've also installed the Sony DRU-540A DVD burner. The machine is blazing fast now, just what I wanted it to be originally. I also have 40 more GB of storage.
My next project? The RAID fileserver. I'm looking to build a 200GB RAID 1 as well as a ~500GB RAID 1 machine. Then I won't have to worry about losing data ever again (in theory).