It has been a while since I last published a new post here. I still have quite a number of drafts lining up, but has never managed to come around to finish them. Probably I should restart writing with some update on my life and some interesting things I learned recently.
A couple months ago I moved to a new country halfway around the world with a new job (or actually same old job in a different company), and I took this chance to learn to build a new PC. I have had a bit of experience with PC hardware before, but mainly from replacing part from a complete build, rather than building from an empty case, so this would be my first time having to work with a new case and mainboard.
Something I learned from this:
- Read the manual of the case. PC cases nowadays have quite a number of features that I didn’t expect. I happened to drop the manual in the box and wasn’t really aware of its existence. That wasn’t a big problem, but I wasted some time reassembling both the power supply and fans after having reading the instruction from the manual.
- Modular power supply can save you a ton of space, especially if you want to tidy up your cables. I ended up removing half the number of cables from my power supply.
- I didn’t know that UEFI boot needs a whole special partition to boot. I unplugged the M.2 drive with OS partition from the old (and working) PC and plugged it to the new one, fully expecting it to just work. Instead, all I got was a message “No Bootable Device Found” in BIOS. I thought it was just some problems with secure boot settings (there are many more related settings in the new mainboard than the old one), but no amount of fiddling there helped. I then tried to use Macrium Reflect Recovery and Windows installation thumb drive to try to repair it, but again all I got were some message about no bootable media.
Turned out there was a EFI partition in my old PC, but it was on another hard drive, not the M.2 SSD, so I had to manually create that partition on my M.2 SSD. A good friend of mine pointed that out and gave me this instruction https://www.tenforums.com/installation-upgrade/52837-moving-recreating-efi-partition.html. It worked perfectly afterward.
With so many new things on the horizon, I hope I’ll have a lot more exciting posts to populate this blog soon.