Antec Overture - I need more power!

[MikeTV]

It took me an evening to move all my bits to my new Antec Overture case (I really like it), but now I think I am lacking in the power department. My PC has locked up a couple of times, and I was only able to boot by disconnecting the CDRW, floppy, and an analogue TV card.

So is there anything I can I do? I don't want to send back the case, unless I have to. It comes with an Antec 380W PSU. And I'd prefer not to have to buy another PSU. But am I out of luck?

I'm doing more tests today, but I'd really like to reconnect the CDRW.

System:
AMD Athlon 2400+ XP CPU
Radeon 9200 Dual VGA
Maxtor 7200 20Gb
Maxtor 7200 60Gb
Nebula DigiTV PCI Card
Phillips Acoutic Edge
DVD Rom Drive
CDRW Writer Drive
Network Card
PCI Analog Lifeview TV Card
USB1 and USB2

(Side issue: I guess I could ditch the 20Gb drive, but that is the system/boot drive, and I don't want to reinstall o/s. I don't seem to be able to get it to boot from the 60Gb drive alone - win xp upgrade issue. I'm not sure why it won't boot, XP is installed on it, and it shows up in disk manager as a "boot" drive, but not as "system".)

Any ideas? Cheers.

 

[MikeTV]

Never mind - I think I have sussed it.

 

[GrahamC]

Please tell what and how because if anybody is searching on the forums to answer a pc fault yours could be the answer they need.

 

[HMHB]

I'd be interested to know as well mate, as I am thinking of buying one of these cases.

 

[MikeTV]

On the Antec power issue: it may have all been my mistake. Sorry

I believe I changed the IDE channel of the drives during the swap, and this caused it to fail to boot until I changed it in the Bios. But I had other issues - a couple of PCI cards were not properly seated, causing it to crash, I think.

So the current status on the power issue is that it runs well for me with all four drives (2 hard drives, 2 CD/DVD), two USB connections (2 ports front, 2 back), Radeon card, Network card, Nebula DigiTV card, floppy drive, and the phllips sound card. I have yet to re-insert the analogue TV card (but I am hopeful it will be fine).


On the "booting from the second system drive" issue, I'll try to explain my steps, as I understand them:

1. Make sure that the drive is formatted/partitioned as a boot drive (use the "Disk Management" tool in XP to check this). If not, the only thing you can do is reformat and reinstall, and lose your whole system.

2. Make sure the drive is set as "active" (use the "Disk Management" tool in XP to check this).

3. Make sure the drive has these important boot files:

boot.ini
NTLDR
NTDETECT.COM

If these are missing, it won't boot from the drive. The files can be found on the Windows setup disk, in the i386 folder.

3. Edit the boot.ini file correctly, taking care to identify the drive correctly! This tripped me up in a couple of ways, and it wouldn't boot at all until I had corrected the problems.

4. Make sure the drive is the IDE "Primary" drive. You'll probably have to set jumpers on the drive itself.

5. Change the BIOS settings to boot from the new drive.

These steps probably only apply to NT/2000/XP, with an NTFS drive.


So, to sum up, I am very happy with my Antec case. I have removed my 20gb drive, which was noisy (even though it was working fine as described above). And it all seems quieter than my previous case and PSU. But it is still a bit noisier than I'd like. This is likely to be due to my cheap hard drive, and the CPU fan, rather than the Antec PSU and case fans. I'll tackle those another day. The temperature is fine also, for my purposes (I'm not an overclocker/power user).

 

[GrahamC]

Thanks Mike TV, this will help somebody sometime.

 

[HMHB]

Cheers. Looks like I can buy this case with confidence.