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I borked up all hard... power supply *DOES* work after all

Maetryx

Maetryx

Diamond Member
Maetryx here, 😎

Man, did I ever want to kick my self tonight. I've been building a computer for my mother, but right from the start I had troubles with the power supply. It didn't put out enough voltage on the red wires (+5V). So I bought a used AT 250W P/S on ebay.

It didn't work either! Only now a couple weeks had elapsed. It would NOT spin up my hard drives, even though the voltmeter indicated all was well. But I could take that old hard drive over to my computer and it would spin up just fine. So I got my money back.

I ordered yet *another* 235W AT P/S off of ebay, and the loser shipped it to me Media mail! It took 3 weeks to get here. Now it's been like a couple months since I told my mom I would make her a computer from used parts. Ugh. So I put the latest P/S in AND THE GOD DAMN HARD DRIVES WON'T SPIN UP! This I find out only *after* I do a lengthy soldering job to get the correct switch working on the latest P/S. The job was only sorta long, but hunting down my soldering equipment took almost an hour of demolishing my house. Something is not right here.

I find out the hard drives WILL spin up if I don't plug the 40-pin ribbon cable in. WTF? I check out my 40-pin cables and discover that I have them reversed on the motherboard, i.e. pin 1 plugged into pin 40 i.e. the red stripe is down the wrong side. Aaaaaaaarrrrrrrgh! The first used P/S I bought probably works just fine! *kick self* *kick self*. I had no idea that getting the cable on backward would prevent a hard drive from SPINNING.

Did anyone else know that?
 
Yep 🙂 I don't know about new PCs but I know on many machine it will stop the entire machine from starting, no CPU fan or anything. Generally the PSU fan does start though.

I've many people have the same problem though, it's a fairly common prob.
 
Maetryx here, 😎

Yeah, I know, I know. It was a stupid mistake. I've been a PC enthusiast for over 10 years, and the red stripe on the 40-pin IDE cable is a convention that is also a little over 10 years old. The mistake usually occurs at the hard drives or the floppy drive, and not on the motherboard. But I did it on the motherboard.

It's an old P-133 from micron, so there are no plastic "boxes" around the 40 pins. Thus no slot to guide my connector in "the right way". Somehow (somehow) I managed to get them on backwards, though the mobo is labled with a "1" and ad "40" near each end of the pin blocks. Oh well. Lesson learned. Now I know that reversed IDE cables can lead to the hard drive not spinning, even though the power is flowing properly.
 
i hope you did not spend much... at least you got your power supplies.

anyway, i always double check cabling. it's the easiest thing to fix, hardest thing to notice.
 
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