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My next feat was installing the harddrive. I wanted to use a standard 3.5"
drive for economy reasons so I grabbed myself a Western Digital 100gb drive from
COMPUSA and tried to work out how I would fit it.
What I did was take a blanking plate, chop it into 4 peices and bent each
of them in half. The first one I drilled a hole on each and mounted them
to the front of the case - now the drive firmly slotted in right underneath
it stopping up and down jolts. The next two I drilled two holes in (shown
in the centre picture) which I attatched with screws to the drive, then
once slid in place screwed into the case. This made for a VERY firm attatchment,
pushing it would not budge at all :D
At this point I still didn't have my motherboard (I had my review sample home
in England) so I hunted around for someone that sells them. Beleive me, these
boards can be VERY tough to find, no shops I went to (and I went to a lot) sold
them, and 98% of them hadn't heard of them! But I eventually bought one from
www.outpost.com, which is the online outlet
for Fry's Electronics. While this was being delivered I decided to modify the
case slightly by adding USB to the front, I did this from a 5 1/4" bay
USB kit.
I removed the board and ports from the kit and started modding the casing.
I snipped off one of the columns (as you can see on the right) and then
took off another two. Then using a fine file I took off enough plastic so
that the USB ports snuggly fitted in the new hole. I then held this in place
with some epoxy putty (it was what was at hand!).
As you can see, a clean mod! Well, not clean - as you can see how dirty
it is and in need of a good spray paint ;)
