It didn’t take long to find my first problem with the PC I just built.

After putting everything together, I plugged it in for the first time and pressed the power button…then held my breath. It POSTed and brought me right to the UEFI/BIOS screen! I sat and monitored the CPU temp for a bit, I was nervous my thermal paste job wasn’t going to hold up. But everything looked good! After flashing the UEFI/BIOS with the updated firmware from MSI, I restarted and continued.

It saw my RAM, the GPU, and both SSD’s, so I was reasonably confident it all worked. After watching a YouTube video of what to do after building your PC from JayzTwoCents and watching a comprehensive PC build from LinusTechTips, I was ready to install the operating system and go through all the updates. For the OS, I chose Windows 11 Home.

After quite some time updating drivers, installing applications from the part manufacturers, all while marveling at the wonder RGB lights from my case, CPU fan, and RAM, I had my first deep dive into the computer.

Problem one found, the second SSD (the 1 TB Samsung) wasn’t showing up. What the heck? I went back into the BIOS to make sure it was still showing up, it was. I restarted more than a few times, and finally started to Google the issue. Apparently, you can’t just expect a storage drive to be ready for use when you install it. I figured out I need to go into Disk Management, active the drive, assign it a drive letter, and the format it before I could start using it. That wasn’t too bad.

I documented the problem and the fix and went about my day figuring out what to do first.

That’s it for now, cheers!