Building a Desktop

[dandymcgee]

Well shit.
I was trying to line it up with the input cover AND the screw spots, and the thing scratched on the bottom. Looks pretty bad. It scratched one of those silver dots around the hole, and is showing some copper.
Should I just try it out? It looks pretty bad.

The silver around the motherboard standoffs is there for conductivity. The purpose of the standoffs is to properly ground the motherboard to your case. If you scratched one it doesn't really matter functionally, only aesthetically. That said, you should definitely be careful when handling the parts, especially with regard to static electricity. Always touch the PC case before anything else (to ground yourself), and NEVER work on a computer with the power supply plugged into the wall. Keep in mind, even with the power supply is unplugged its capacitors store enough electricity to give you quite a jolt so, as will all electronics, be careful what you're poking with your screw driver.

[Benjamin100]

All done.
This is it.
Running Ubuntu.

[Benjamin100]

Well, turns out I couldn't go very long without wanting to use some of my old familiar programs on the new desktop. Guess I'll reinstall Ubuntu soon for a dual boot.

[dandymcgee]

Well, turns out I couldn't go very long without wanting to use some of my old familiar programs on the new desktop. Guess I'll reinstall Ubuntu soon for a dual boot.

The problem with dual boot is you end up never booting into Linux, lol. I would recommend using one as your host machine and the other as a VM to prevent having to reboot to switch between them. To start, I would put the one you use less often in the VM.

[wtetzner]

The problem with dual boot is you end up never booting into Linux, lol.

Or in my case, never end up booting into Windows, but just end up wasting half or your hard drive space.

[Benjamin100]

Wish I had read these before. Been trying to install Ubuntu all day. Tricky mainly because I cannot see the Windows partition in Ubuntu installation. Very annoying. Shows it all as free space.

[bbguimaraes]

Are you sure you didn't erase the whole disk at some point in the installation? The installer is very careful to warn you, but sometimes it's just a bad day I've never had this problem with the ubuntu installer (or any linux installer).

edit: anyway, it is better than the windows installer, which doesn't give a shit about the other partitions and just claims the hard drive all for itself (and the damned "recovery partition").

On the dual boot subject: pretty much what the others said. Install linux, fire up a vm/wine when needed and never look back.

[dandymcgee]

Usually *nix is exceptionally more talented at recognizing partitions than Windows. Ubuntu will let you mount an NTFS partition just fine, but getting Windows to acknowledge a ext3 partition is damn near impossible. If Linux says it's free space, I would lean toward the above and assume you wiped the disk. If you had no important data on the Windows partition it's a minor inconvenience for you to learn from.