Building a new PC ...

[Pol]

And you have now WinXP or 7?

In both cases it may be safer for you to disconnect unnecessary drives and reinstall. Then connect them back.

The old drive may slow down your system. That's why I proposed to keep it only like an external.

If you are in hurry and don't have data to lose (or you are simply not afraid), you may try something like easybcd, to shift bootmanager to another hdd.

That should work too, never tested it myself.

[Kalah]

Win7 on the SSD, XP on the old HDD. Maybe I should take the PC back to the tech guys at work...

[Pol]

Win7 on the SSD, XP on the old HDD. Maybe I should take the PC back to the tech guys at work...

Or that.. if you don't dare.

[Kalah]

I guess the logical thing to do would be to reinstall Win 7 on the SSD with the old HDD disconnected. Then never reconnect the old HDD and instead discard it ...

[Pol]

Kinda of the first part. But you may reconnect old drive later. Just the drive. And completely reformat with GParted. As written above.

All drives may work together, anytime.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, your graphics card is very weak compared to the rest of your setup. But RAM? 16 GiB is already overkill, why would you want to upgrade that?

As for your current situation, umm, what? So you have 3 disks. The old one has XP, the SSD has Win7, the Green is your storage disk as far as I can tell. You can select which disk to boot from your UEFI. If you boot from the SSD, you should get Win7, if you boot from the old drive, you should get WinXP.

You need to use GPartEd to wipe the old drive (Windows-based partitioning tools have always been very bad). Pol's suggestion of removing the other drives is for security purposes, because that way you won't get confused as to which drive you want to wipe. But it's not strictly necessary. If you know the partition layouts of all the disks, you can just boot from GPartEd and select the disk you want (just have to be careful to not select the Win7 one).

Wiping the disk means simply creating a new partition table. Since you have a modern system, I suggest using GPT partition table instead of the obsolete MSDOS (GPT is much simpler and doesn't have the limits of the old crufty MSDOS table layout; however, Windows is often stupid and might not like the new fancy things, in which case you can just remake the partitioning table back to MSDOS). Once that's done, create the partitions you want there.

Having an extra drive is always nice, because you can use it for testing things without worrying that you'll break something in the current system. For example, testing the ReFS file system (the Microsoft version of Btrfs that should no longer eat your data for lunch), or testing if reinstalling your current system would solve some OS issues, or install Win95 for old program compatibility etc. etc.

As for boot issues, there can be none. You just select what you want to boot from the UEFI, and the UEFI looks for the boot flag in the disk you select (flags are shown in GPartEd), then boots from that. Or it looks at the Master Boot Record if it's a MSDOS partition table and the MBR exists, but the MBR is part of the partition table, so you can't lose it unless you erase it deliberately. If something fails to boot, then you either selected the wrong disk, the partition you want to boot does not have the boot flag set (trivial to fix in GPartEd), or the MBR is erased.

[Kalah]

So there are no issues with the SSD working slower or anything - I can just leave the system as it is, with the SSD running Win7? The fact that there is a disk with XP on it will have no effects on performance? In that case, I may just leave everything as it is and instead do a full OS reinstall on the SSD (and throwing away the old HDD) at some later date.

The boot problem persists, however. Upon startup, I get the NTLRD message and have to go into the boot menu. If I then choose to boot from the new disk, I get the message "Reboot and select proper boot device." It just wont use the SSD to boot up!

[Kalah]

Disconnected the old HDD and will throw it away (or decide later). Reinstalled Win7 on SSD. Works beautifully.

[GreatEmerald]

No, there are no adverse effects of having an HDD alongside an SSD. As long as all your system files are on the SSD, they will get loaded fast. You can keep all the on-demand files (backups, music, etc.) on the HDD to save space, too.

The "select proper device" means some partitioning issue, most likely the boot flag or the boot partition being somewhere strange. Maybe Windows got confused about having multiple disks and installed some files on one, and some files on another drive.

Reconnecting the drive shouldn't give you any problems now (unless Windows is even more stupid than I thought).

And, again, if you know how to use GPartEd, then you won't run into problems like that, because it allows you to inspect the partitioning, change boot flags and run file system checks.

[Kalah]

Everything on my new PC is working perfectly and all I have to decide now is what kind of games to play!

[Pol]

The Best ones, of course. Watch Steam and GoG and Humble Bundle Christmas sales!

[Kalah]

So it's been a couple of years and my PC has been working great, but now it's time to upgrade the GPU. As you can see in that thread, I've had lots of installation issues, but if it turns out to be as simple as not having enough power, I'll have that figured out soon-ish.

When you draw power through a wire, heat is generated. The more power, the more heat. The number one cause of electrical fires in this country is caused by either faulty wiring or people drawing too much power through a single wire. Since my new GPU requires a lot of power, it's probably not a very good idea to simply connect Y-splitters and run more power through a single wire. Problem is, there are no free sockets. That means I'll have need of a power supply with more sockets so that I can draw power directly from it - and while I'm at it, I might as well buy something with more umph.

The Corsair CX450M is my current PSU. Possible upgrades include its big brother, the CX850M, the higher-standard RM850x and the EVGA supernova 750 which has lots of connectors.

I just have to make sure it will fit in the chassis ... it can't be any taller than my current one, since the new GPU is directly above it.

[Pol]

Well, it will run that GPU, once again. But I was living under impression that you were having CX430?

Why not to try something from germany? I have this one. If you need to have it modular and stronger list to 600W CM (CM = Cable Management).

Of course, EVGA Supernova 750W G2 is superb, although it's indeed with a great reserve.

[Kalah]

Soooo it looks like my PSU is underpowered. I think I need a better one, with more cables going directly from the unit in order to supply that monster GPU with dedicated lines of power.

[Pol]

I think, that previous replies still apply, in general.

[Kalah]

In the process of buying a new PSU. That means replacing this with something else; I'm thinking about this one. It will fit in the chassis, has higher output and more cables/slots so that I can have dedicated cables going to each unit in the chassis.

Hopefully, that will fix my current sound problem (there's a noise whenever the GPU works, as if it draws too much power). I am, however, considering buying a dedicated sound card as well (if I'm not mistaken, I don't have one; it's integrated into the motherboard, yes?). I'd just have to make sure it fits somewhere inside the chassis.

[Panda Tar]

Well, with this AMD stuff going all out, it'll be nice seeing prices dropping here and there. Intel prices were too high.

[Sslaxx]

Cheaper prices on the older/current stuff would be great. This PC is slowly dying on its arse and I need to replace it before it does (and while I still have the financial ability to get another!).

[Pol]

I have no time to check new reviews of CoolerMaster but in past, apart from the top models, they were just average. Generally ENVY or BeQuite are much safer bets. (Cooler Master middle line in past was same like low cost Corsairs, or Enermaxes or Fortrons - look at it as the same factory and very similar design.) See the review of its predecessor.

Good sites to check PSUs are:
hardwaresecrets.com
jonnyguru.com

Noise when GPU works is matter of electronical interference, so the reason may be different than just not having enough power. Although, fluctuation of voltage may be the one. Just don't attach to this.

I have two soundcards, both actually good. One is on board but shielded - which is a standard for better gaming boards. And then I have a dedicated card Maya44, which is sold to these days in pciex version. However you may be thinking about it only if you plan to occcassinally play with music, ie having keys and some music soft as a minimum.

For gaming go for "ASUS Strix RAID" or some SB "Audigy". You should have at home at least 5+1 Dolby/Atmos sound system. Otherwise, it's probably impracitcal to invest in.