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Dead Hard Drive?

P

perlmonger

Member
This one's kinda wierd. I thought my new KT600A mobo crapped out on me, but now I think it's the hard drive. I recently installed a new ECS KT600A mobo/Sempron 2400+ bundle from outpost along with a geForce 5200fx in an old compaq G600. It was a bitch to get running, I think because the PS is only a 250 watt, but once I finally got winXP pro installed it ran like a champ for about 3 weeks. (on 24/7) I went to use it yesterday and, well nothing. No video, no keyboard lights, nothing. Tried all the usual tricks; reseat vid card, reseat ram, fans running on video card and processor. I then unplugged the hard drive and bam! the bios screen appeared. Could the hard disk be the problem? I haven't seen this before and I can't understand why the HDD would keep the bios screen from appearing.

I think I'm gonna need some help from you guys on this one.
 
I think because the PS is only a 250 watt
Click to expand...

That's the key right there. Your Sempron pulls anywhere from 65-70 watts, the video card pulls 40 watts through the AGP port and may pull even more if it has an external power connector, the motherboard takes 25 watts, keyboard and mouse take 3 watts, a floppy drive would take 5 watts, a CD Rom takes 20 watts, each stick of RAM takes about 10 watts (I assume you have two), each fan including the CPU fan takes 3-5 watts, and any other PCI or USB devices would pull 5 watts or more each.

Assuming that you have no fans in the system other than the CPU fan and no PCI or USB peripherals, you're looking at an absolute minimum of 209 watts constant power with the hard drive attached. Assuming you had a very good quality 250 watt PSU (in a Compaq case there's zero chance of that) you might be OK although only just barely so.

It sounds like the PSU just can't provide the power that your system needs, especially if you have additional case fans and other peripherals. It might have worked temporarily but if it was that close to borderline it wouldn't be at all surprising to find that you had fried something inside the PSU and that is why it isn't working now. It would also explain why the system will boot without the hard drive connected since that would be 25 watts of drain less on the PSU.
 
After some study and experimentation, I agree with you. I'm going to pick up a new PS today and see what happens. I hope I haven't buggered and hardware and even If I did, I'll need a new PS to rebuild upon. I'll post results in case anyone is interested.

Thanks Fardringle
 
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