Dead PC - no power

[a73uk]

The other day I was moving stuff from my external hard drive onto my PC to tidy it up, it cut out several times, immediately rebooting itself each time.

I assumed there was some kind of issue with the hard drives conflicting as I`ve had an issue with the raid driver on an installed chinese SATA card for a while.

Anyway, last night it powered off mid file transfer, it didnt reboot this time, & basically wouldnt respond.

Today I swapped the power supply out of a known working spares computer & nothing.

This PSU (Lite On) has an LED which comes on when plugged in.

I cleaned it all out & re-did all the connections but its still not responding.

Anyone got any ideas?

Cheers!

 

[Dragon Man]

how many drives you got in the system man?

you could be over loading the PSU.. im running a 1kw psu and i have overloaded that before.

basicly if you have too many hard drives plugged into the power supply at one time it will take the power away from the mobo/gpu to try and compensate.

300 and 400 watt psu's can only give out so much. if you have say 4 hard drives and a fairly good computer with dual core support its going to be at its max.

jerry rig the old PSU to run the some of hard drives and let the psu in the computer run the mobo, cd drive, and main C drive if your windows (/ if your linux)

the only other thing that can cause hard drives to fail is if they have been dammaged.
but given your main OS hard drive is fine it should just fail the transfer not reset the system.

i think its power mate.. like me in my 889cc cinq trying to overtake... i canny do it captin.. i dont have the power.

 

[a73uk]

I hear what your saying, its got 2 hard drives in it, admittedly the PSU was low output (300w), but its been fine for the last year + with 2 drives in, even when I`ve connected the external HD on.

I`ve tried it with 1 HD & still nothing, not even a click, with either PSU.

 

[udtrev]

I've had to replace several PSUs, I usually fitted a 650w to end the problem, I was running UD and Find-a-drug which meant that the processor was running at 100% 24/7.
now the projects have finished, for some strange reason, I have a friendlier leccy bill

Trev

 

[a73uk]

I had to replace the PSU on my other PC about 6 months back, it was much, much quieter, butI didnt notice a reduction in my leccy bill!

I`m just suprised that even after swaping PSU`s, theres still no reaction from it, not even an `on & instant off`, despite the PSU LED being on.

I just dont want to buy another PSU if it isnt that!

I did dismantle the original PSU to clean it & check for an internal fuse, it wasnt rediculously dirty & thre is no internal fuse, the switch does feel a bit glitchy though.

 

[udtrev]

The leccy bill is better because the projects are over, no more 24/7 flat out running

 

[colinf1]

Check wheter there is a Power LED on the mobo, if its not illuminated when the power supply LED is, id say ur mobo is a gonner...

Remove everything apart from the CPU and try and turn it on then.

If nothing happens, think theres no other solution other than to replace the mobo.

 

[DaveMcT]

My old PC would start to boot then cut out just as Windows started. My data was elsewhere so using an Ubuntu disc I refomatted the hard drive and there were some errors.
I got it going again but a few moths later the fault was back.

For all the world it looked like power supply and I had no time so took it to a repair shop. The gut put it on test and the power supply was fine but just as he was giving up the fault kicked off. It was the mobo and it had screwed up my boot-sector tripping out at just the wrong moment. Most likely that was the cause all the time.

I bought an ASUS barebones box and added my own processor memory and drives.

 

[a73uk]

Thanks for the replies guys, I tried what you suggested Colin, my motherboard doesnt have an LED, but my IDE-SATA card does, & theres 3 cosmetic LED`s on the case front, none powered up with either PSU.

When you plug the power lead into the PSU, you hear the crackle as the power goes in. I`m guessing the 4-pin plug from the PSU is the motherboards switching signal for the PSU?

Anyway, I`m going to transfer everything over to the spares computer this evening to see what happens, IIRC the reason that PC (HP Pav T430) was for spares is a BIOS update issue... other than that, it worked... we`ll see.

 

[a73uk]

Well I swapped everything over & it starts on the old PSU, unfortunately its not recognising my SATA hard drives using the IDE-SATA adaptors (neither IDE slot or a SATA motherboard card) & trying my 6 old IDE HD`s had a variety of results, although none seem to be usable.

I`m going to pick up another 778 motherboard (with SATA) & maybe a couple more hard drives to see what I can knock up, might end up with 2 working PC`s... maybe...

 

[DaveMcT]

Sadly only my discs were compatible even the DVD had to be changed as serial (wide ribbon cable type) isnt used any more.

But I'm glad I just junked the old PC. The new one (same windows SW) is smaller, faster, boots quicker and much less noisy.