With the motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU and video board now loaded, the only remaining components are the hard drive and the optical drive. Both components are similar in mounting. They need to be put in the drive bays and have power and communication cables connected.
Hard Drive Mounting:The hard drive mounts in the smaller 3.5 inch drive bay space of your computer case. This mounting orientation can vary depending on the case but the most common is horizontally with the connections facing into the case. It can sometimes be mounted horizontally with the connections facing the left panel (when viewed from the front).
Hard drives can heat up with extended use so if you happen to have a front intake fan, you can cool down your hard drive by mounting it such that the air from the fan absorbs the heat from the drive. This means you need to mount your drive in the lower section of your case. If you are mounting more than one drive, see if you can leave some space between the drives so that they don't heat each other.
To attach the hard drive to the drive bay, the traditional way is to slide the hard drive into the bay and screw it down. There are four small screw holes in the hard drive (check before mounting) and these should align with open slots or holes in the drive bay. You will need to remove both case panels to access the holes and screw in the drive. Some cases come with tool-less drive mounts. These can range from attaching some clip or extensions to the drive and pushing the drive into the bay until it spring locks to having some mechanical lever that you lock down once the drive is in place. If you have a tool-less drive bay case, make sure you study your manual. If your manual is ambiguous about how to use the tool-less bays, and you bought the case from NewEgg, check the customer reviews as someone may have mentioned how to use the tool less system properly. If you have a removable drive bay, take the drive bay out of the case, mount the drive and then reattach it back into the case.
Modern hard drives usually come with three different connection types, IDE (aka Ultra ATA), SATA 150 or SATA 3G. If the connection is IDE, get your IDE ribbon cable that came with the motherboard (or an IDE round cable if you bought one) and connect it up to the back connection on the hard drive (it should be pretty obvious where it connects, there is a slot that guides the connector so you should check the connector for a small raised section on the upper middle part of the connector and match it to the slot on the hard drive socket). Once the IDE is attached, connect the power cord. It should take a standard 12V 4 pin molex from your power supply. Just stick one of your available 4 pins cables from your PSU to the drive. There you are done.
If your connector is SATA, then your motherboard should have multiple SATA connections. Your motherboard should have come with thin SATA cables as well. Connect the SATA connector to one of the SATA sockets on the motherboard and the other side to the SATA socket on the hard drive. Take a look at the hard drive socket to understand how the connector plugs in. A SATA hard drive also uses a special SATA power connection. Modern PSU's should all have at least two SATA power cables available for connection and you can use one of these. If not, then your motherboard may have come with a 4 pin molex to SATA connector adapter. If it didn't, then you can always buy one at many computer component stores.
Ok so the hard drive is connected up.
Optical Drive Connection:The Optical drive connection is basically identical to the hard drive connection except it goes into the 5.25" larger drive bay. It also needs to come out the front end of your computer. To do so, you may have to remove the front face of your computer case to remove a metal panel in the front chassis and the drive bay cover in the front face. Once again, check the manual.
All optical drives are set up so that they fit the front face of all ATX PC cases perfectly. If you have a screw in type mount (vs the tool-less mount) you will have some ability to adjust the distance to make sure the front face of the optic drive is flush with the PC case. Almost all optical drives are mounted in the upper half of the PC case (unless you have a HTPC style case and not an ATX tower case)
Once mounted, you will once again have to find the connections. Most Optical drives are IDE connections (though some of the new ones have SATA). Get the second plug in the IDE ribbon cable and connect it up to the optical drive. If your motherboard only has one IDE socket and you are using an IDE hard drive (like Ultra ATA), you may have to mount your hard drive and optic drive near each other so that the cables can reach both components. If your motherboard has two IDE cables, then you can use one for the hard drive and one for the optical drive. Aside from the communications cable, you will need to connect a 4 pin molex power connection from the PSU to the optical drive.
If you have one of the few optical drives that connects to a SATA drive, then you will need to connect a SATA cable to one of the remaining SATA sockets on the motherboard (since only one component connects to one SATA cable). Then connect the SATA power cable from the PSU to the optical drive.
Congratulations! you have finished connecting up all the basics components in your PC. At this point, sit back and double check all connections and components in your PC. Make sure you haven't left any tools in your PC. Even if you have other peripherals like a sound card, fan controller, etc, you may want to wait until after the first power up before connecting those up. Doing the first power up with the least components makes any trouble shooting easier. Once you know your base PC works, you can start adding one component at a time to ensure each one connects properly.
Powering Up your PC:Ok so its now ready to power up. One thing I have heard is that it is bad luck to put the panels back on the PC before its first power up. If you close your PC nice and tight, Murphy's law will make sure it doesn't work so that you have to open it all up again. So you can do the first power up with the side panels off.
Connect your mouse, keyboard, monitor, and power to the PC. You can connect the speakers if you want but is not necessary. Once everything is connected, find the main power switch at the back of your PC (on the Power Supply Unit) and turn it on. You may notice an LED lighting up on your motherboard that indicates your power is now available (not all mobos have this).
Now cross your fingers and press the front power switch. If all goes well, you should hear the fans start up and then after a few seconds you should hear the familiar short "beep" from the motherboard and be greeted with the motherboard screen. At this point, hit the delete key on your keyboard and keep it pushed down until your hear some weird clicking or until you enter your BIOS screen. If this come up, congratulations, you got your PC to POST (Power On Self Test).
Now, though it may look complicated, take your time and browse around in the BIOS. Everything should be set to default values so you should be ok so long as you don't touch anything for now. Get familiar with all the options in your BIOS and use your manual to understand the various values. Don't get upset if you don't understand everything (which I still don't). The point is to understand whatever you can. There is a "general" section that gives information on what is connected on your system. You should see that your optical and hard drives are identified. You should also see the correct amount of RAM memory displayed. You may also see details of your RAM timing, and a bunch of options on everything from case alarms to fan controlling.
There are three things I would immediately check. First, check to make sure your hard drive, optic drive and RAM look ok and that your CPU is identified properly. Second, go to the power management section and check both the DC voltages (12V, 5V and 3.3V) as well as the CPU and Motherboard temperatures. Make sure they are not overheating. They should be anywhere from 30C - 50C. Lower is fine but above 50C on idle and you may have some problems with your heat sink. If they are above 60C then shut down your PC immediately (just push the power switch for an extended time and it should power down automatically...DON'T SWITCH OFF THE BACK POWER SWITCH AND DON'T PULL THE PLUG!). If your temps are unusually high, check to make sure all your fans (especially the cpu fan and if you have one, the chipset fan is spinning). Once everything is ok, go to the next step.
The third thing to check is the graphics board. This is especially true if your motherboard has onboard graphics capability. If you put in a separate graphics board, it should be identified on your BIOS. If you have onboard graphics and you put in a separate card, you will have to disable the onboard graphics and set it to whatever socket the separate graphics card is on (usually PCI express or AGP).
Once everything is set, press F10 or exits while saving, this will save all your changes and exit the BIOS and restart the computer. At this point, press the delete key again and once you are in the BIOS, double check to see that everything is set properly, including your changes.
If you started tinkering with the settings and changed something you shouldn't have and can't figure out what it was before. Then there should be a "reset BIOS to default" sort of option somewhere. Reset this and your options should go back to the safe default mode.
Once you've become familiar with the BIOS and everything seems to be running ok. Its time to actually load up your software, starting with Windows.
(to be continued....)