Chapter 2 : Hardware Installation
Hardware Installation
The final step now involves connecting the chassis itself to the motherboard, this is to add
important functions to the chassis such as the power and reset switches, power and HDD LED
lights and also additional USB, Firewire (1394) and audio ports
to the chassis. This can be quite tricky, and will require some
adequate lighting. First you need to identify the connectors that
your chassis supports. These are fairly small connectors protruding from the inside front of the chassis and they should be
labeled ‘Power SW’, ‘Reset SW’, ‘Power+ LED’, ‘1394’ and ‘USB’
respectively.
Once you’ve identified these, you can then identify the relevant
pin headers on the board. Most of these will be located on the
opposite side from the CPU, near the edge. Most motherboard
manufacturers label the pin headers on the board, but it may
also be useful to consult the motherboard manual for
additional assistance (these connectors do not carry dangerous
voltage levels, so power and reset connectors for example can
be attached in either direction). Video here
Step 4
Installing the Drives
Your PC will, generally speaking, use two kinds of drives; optical drives used for reading and
writing removal media such as DVDs and Blue-ray disks, and hard disk drives used as the
system’s boot partition for the OS and also for general data storage. In this section we’ll show
you how to install these drives in your PC. For general information about PC drives, refer to
page 6.
To install optical drives, most chassis’ require that you first remove or open the front panel. The
power and reset switches and activity LEDs that we attached to the board earlier are usually
found installed on the front panel, sometimes also with USB ports or audio jacks. This means
that although you can ‘pop-out’ the front panel, it may still be attached to the chassis by these
connecting wires, if this is the case, just gently lay the front panel to one side as you install the
optical drives. If in doubt, consult the chassis manufacturer’s manual.
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How to Build Your Own PC