This past weekend I helped my girlfriend's dad put together a new gaming PC.  We bought all the parts from our local Frys Electronics store.  We got a case, PSU, mother board, CPU, RAM, video card, sound card, hard drive, and LCD monitor.  We got nothing but premium, top of the line parts.  I said it should take us a few hours to put the system together and install the OS with additional software.

Well normally it does only take a few hours to do this.  But not when you have a faulty piece of hardware.  When we first plugged in the hard drive, the BIOS would not detect it.  We checked the cabling multiple times and everything seemed OK.  We tried plugging it into different SATA slots and every now and then the BIOS would finally detect it.  But it never seemed to detect it on SATA1.  I couldn't figure if the cabling was bad, or the hard drive, or the motherboard.

So we finally seemed to get it working on SATA2 and booted up to the Windows XP disc.  When starting the XP installation it said it could not find the hard drive and setup could not continue.  Tried this multiple times on SATA2, SATA3, and SATA4.  Same issue every time - BIOS would detect the hard drive, but the XP install wouldn't.  And we still couldn't get the BIOS to detect the hard drive in SATA1.

But I figured the hard drive was OK.  It came with its own utility/boot disc that we used to partition and format the drive.  No issues with that at all.  But still XP wouldn't detect the hard drive.  We plugged it back into SATA1 and all of a sudden, the BIOS finally decides to detect the hard drive.  We run the XP install and it now sees the hard drive as well.  So we install the OS completely.  Weird.

Afterwards we start installing drivers for the motherboard, video card, sound, etc.  Of course this requires us to reboot the system multiple times.  But every now and then Windows will not start up.  It just freezes when you get the black, Windows XP loading screen.  Now at this point it seems to me like it's a driver issue.  There's a conflict somewhere that's causing Windows to hang while booting up.  So we try starting the system in Safe Mode.  Same issue.  Windows still locks up during loading.  Uh oh.  

But this seems to be happening randomly.  When we restarted the computer again, it started just fine.  It seems like every third or fourth time we restarted the computer, it would lock up while loading Windows.  We couldn't narrow it down to any specific driver issue either.  It was just that some times Windows would load, and other times it wouldn't.

Then we finally noticed something else.  Every time Windows locked up, something inside the computer case would 'click'.  Upon further investigation, it seemed the hard drive was clicking each time Windows locked up.  We figured it has to be the hard drive.  So we went back to the store and exchanged it for another one.  Plugged this new drive in, BIOS detected it immediately, Windows installs without any issues, and we get the drivers and addional software installed as well.  Everything is working great now.

Something that should of taken us a few hours to complete, instead took us a couple days.  Oi.