Building a PC for a friend or family member is the nicest present you can give them.  Good on you.

backs out of the room slowly...  

I have put together rigs for her that were mainly spare parts after my own upgrades, or leftovers from other retired PCs, but this is the first time she has ever had the money to afford such a thing, having often helped nephews and nieces, son and daughter with money to rarely ever get it back.  However, she was repaid a lump sum and I was asked to select the parts and build her a new machine as the one she was using had died completely... the mobo began displaying errors and eventually just gave up the ghost.

Thing is, I enjoy getting into the guts of a PC, whether it be building from scratch, upgrading components or fixing things other can't.  Hence I am the goto man in the family for PC related things, though I always stress that I am no expert but will do my best.  Although I have learnt alot about software related matters since joining WC, thanks to yrag and others with knowledge to impart, I am better with hardware related things and love nothing better than tinkering inside cases, particularly new ones with all new components to assemble.

It's a bit late in life now, but were I to have my time over, I'd further my education to become a PC tech instead of busting my balls shifting other peoples furniture and other heavy duty jobs I'd held in the past.

Oh well!

There's always the next life Mark or so I've heard. Just think, you could come back as the guy who invented the wheel.

Could?! He's so old that it WAS him wot invented it.

Its a doozy starkers!

Nice cable dressing too!

Yep your sister will be pleased!

Awesome, starkers, just awesome.  By the way, the sata cables ad an artistic flair to the entire composition!  Don't cut yourself short.  Great job, great look, great performance, great bro.  What else could a sister want? 

once you've finished mine, i expect it to be personally delivered asap. remember, i don't use thermaltake parts. top tier intel (cpu), corsair, samsung, lian-li, asus, amd/ati (video) only. i'll do the cabling, though.

Stand in line.....please.

I was thrilled when I built my sister her first 10 speed bike!  Times change.

Hehe, my sister really wanted a blow-up man, but rubber aggravates my dermatitis so she had to settle for a a PC instead.  However, I did tell her that as my tech skills increase, I could possibly build her a well endowed cyborg if she bought the parts.

Seriously, though, it was fun putting it all together.  However, we have run up against a snag and I have no idea how to resolve it as I can not get power to the front panel and now seemingly the mobo.... thus it will not post, or boot.  Everything was fine until I installed the 3 bay IcyDock portable rack [which finally arrived on Wednesday]... the machine booted once after that, then nothing. 

I have practically stripped the machine down to the case and started from scratch, but alas, no solution to the problem.... it's like it's dead.  I have tried an alternate power supply but still no go.  I also reseated the CPU; RAM: GPU and anything else that's not nailed down, still no go. Yup, I am totally baffled and have no idea where to start next to resolve the issue.

Hopefully somebody here may be able to offer some answers... and soon. Right now she is using a 6 y/o laptop that's as slow as a wet week, and I keep apologising because I haven't been able to hand it over to her in full working order.  So yeah, people, speshully them wot knows a fing or 2 'bout puters, please see if yer can maske an old fart and his sister happy.

Strange thing about it, though, I purchased the exact same mobile rack, and my PC wouldn't start afted I had installed it... like it was as dead as a dodo as well.  Again, I backtracked to before the rack was installed and nothing.  I even re-routed the power cables so that the front panel and rack were on connected separately - thinking too much draw on the one may have shorted something - but that wasn't it, either.  In fact, I'm not entirely sure what I did to get my rig booting again but it is.... touch wood.

I think the key diffrence between our machines is that I have a motherboard with more restart/reset options and was able to kickstart it using one of those options.  Sadly, my sister's mobo is quite basic and I'm not sure how to kickstart it.... like I don't know how I can clear the CMOS or reset the BIOS if no power is reaching the front panel to turn the machine on.

One would imagine there's still a jumper for shorting the cmos for a reset.  Power only needs to be to the mobo...front panel is irrelevant.

One would also 'expect' that having the issue the first time would shy you away from using that hardware a second time...

There's probably an RTFM somewhere that tells you to alter some settings in the bios BEFORE attaching the rack....

The CMOS jumper works by completing a ground circuit and you don't want it turned on, or any power to the machine when clearing it anyway so unplug the machine and hold the power button down for a minute to discharge the caps and then set the jumper to clear it.

Alternately, you can remove the CMOS battery for 20 minutes while the machine is unplugged then put it back in. (Again, hold the power switch down for 60 seconds with the battery out and the machine unplugged.)

I'm with Jafo, that particular bit you are connecting will let all the magic smoke out of a motherboard someday. 

Thing is, the problem didn't manifest itself to me until I tried to reboot the 1st machine upon completion of the 2nd, hence I had no reason to suspect anything until attempting to boot the 1st machine for the 2nd time.

Oh well. I'll just have to insure it for magic smoke loss.