Is this too much load for my power supply?

[MrBond]

I had some free time today, and as sometimes happens when I have free time, I may have just fubar'ed my system.

My system pre-interference was as follows

3 HDDs, DVDROM, CDRW, USB Printer, USB Mouse, Geforce4 Ti4200, WinTV, Netgear NIC, Santa Cruz, FDD. All this on an Enermax EG365P-VE (power supply info)

To this, I added one new hard drive. Initial power on led to fans spinning up and leds lighting, but no video to the monitor. I powered down, made sure connections were snug, and powered back on. This time, I got all the way into Windows, before I realized the keyboard was dead and the system had hard locked. I powered down, popped out the drive, and powered back on. This time, I got to the BIOS error screen (ASUS A7V, on boot errors it thinks it might be a bad cpu setting and goes into the bios automaticlly). Same thing, system was hard locked.

Did I just bone my system? I'd think a 350watt power supply would handle this load, but maybe not. I notice no smells/cracking/pops like a dead/dying power supply, the cpu fan is running so I doubt its a dead chip.

Any ideas? I'm stuck (again). I need to stop opening the case on my computer

 

[MrBond]

Bump, still down

 

[Slammy1]

I run a very similar system on the same PS (3 SCSI HDs, 2 SCSI optical drives, 1 IDE drive, SBLive, PIII-850, AIW 9700) and have no observed probs, but it does sound like your PS is fried. I wonder if my upcoming Canterwood upgrade will cause issues.

 

[capricorn]

It's possible that 4 drives is too much. I looked at the power requirements for an average 80 GB Maxtor drive and while the computer is running, four such drives could potentially need about 40-50 W total. Typically, they'd be using more like 20-25 W assuming one or two drives is actively seeking and the others are idle. However, during spin up when powered on, four of these drives would need about 110 W. That may be taking you over the edge. Given that it's an Enermax P/S, I'd be surprised if you did permanent damage though. I'm surprised it didn't come back after you removed that drive. It may have nailed the ESCD (Extended System Configuration Data) in the BIOS when it went south. I would think that clearing the BIOS/CMOS on your motherboard would fix that. You might give that a try.

-cap

 

[MrBond]

I'll try clearing the CMOS, normally I'd do that sort of thing as part of normal troubleshooting, but with this A7v I have, its not a jumper, its two solder points on the MB, which makes it a PITA to short.

The system did come up without the drive in it, but I was getting hard locks both times. I'll try shorting the cmos at lunch and see if that fixes it

 

[amgkid]

not sure if it's too much. i have the following
4 harddrives, a 160, 60,30,13
cdrw, dvd-rom
ti4200, sblive
all on a p4 1.6@2.4ghz with bumped up vcore

running on an antec 300w power supply (303xp, i think). works great and it was cheap. i don't think the load is too much but maybe power supplies vary. enermax is supposed to be good though.

 

[MrBond]

Maybe there was just some weirdness with the system, but for some reason, it came back up no problem today at noon.

I'm checking out new cases now, I was really streaching to get that 4th drive in here, so maybe I pinched a cable or something.