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PSU leads (and smoke?)

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Ah! So, i'm in the middle of a boot crisis ( i hang every time at the DMI Pool verification, can't boot from CD with any HD plugged in, and I think my floppy drive is bad). I was swapping out floppy drives to check and see if mine was bad (I thought it was because I could boot to DOS fine with another drive; BTW I tried doing a "sys c:" and "fdisk /mbr" with a Win XP bootable disk, but each came back with an "unknown command" message; what am I doing wrong??) Anyway, putting the system all back together to give up on it for now, but when I booted to make sure everything was ok in the BIOS still, I HAD SMOKE. The case was open, so I literally got to watch the power lead going to my floppy incinerate in front of my eyes, even as I frantically powered off and unplugged. I don't think anything too horrible happened (hard to say when the computer doesn't boot anyways), but the lead going to the floppy is completey fried (casing came off the wire and everything) and the electrical connector on the flopppy is partially melted (doesn't matter since I already determined it wasn't working). Here's my question, the power lead going to the floppy is at the end of a chain with two other connectors I'm using to power my DVD and CDRW: can I just cut off the burnt portion of the cord and wrap up the ends? Will it affect the rest of power connectors (the actual wire burning stopped before it got all the way back to the connector going to the DVD, thankfully.) This is quickly becoming a nightmare...
 
Should be ok, but more importantly, why did your lead decide to heat up?
The only time I had this was when I caught a couple of leads leading to an LED as I put the case back together - lots of smoke, and the smell of poo.
Trimmed and insulated the leads - no problem. No LED though....
 
What's going on? I'm seeing quite a few threads recently speaking of roasted floppy drive power connectors.

I only once roasted a floppy drive power connector - way back in the days of the 486. I thought it kind of looked like a CD-ROM audio connector. The soundcard died, valiantly sacrificing itself to save the rest of the computer. And come to think of it, the power connector wasn't even damaged.
 
In the aftermath, it looks like when I was putting it all back together, I bent one of the pins on the floppy power connector. my mistake. 😱 Cut if off, tidied it up, and now everything boots normally. And by normally, I mean I still get a hang at the DMI Verification, and I have no clue what to do next. *sigh* :roll:
 
Yea. All HDD and opticals will show up in the BIOS, in any configuration. I've tried removing them all and connecting them one at a time, going in to see that they register in BIOS, and changing the boot order to make each drive first with no other drives after that. Both CD drives will boot to CD in this circumstance; the slave HDD boots to the faulty Win XP setup (As I described before); but whenever I have the master HDD connected, it registers in the BIOS fine, but whether or not it's in the boot order, I get the DMI hangup. EXCEPT, for when I tried booting to floppy, in which case it booted to floppy, but then fdisk etc. didn't work (as I mentioned before). I'm going to try changing the CMOS battery tomorrow as another step, though I'm not sure that would be the problem. I think I may just go back and try everything one by one again to be sure I've covered all my bases. If I could figure out a way to format the slave HDD (to get rid of the faulty XP setup), I could try reinstalling XP on there and go through with that as the primary and see if I can access my other HDD that way. Only problem is, that slave HDD isn't 100% stable I don't think.
 
Antec SL300s (300 W) came with the case. Tried unplugging everything, even case fans. No change. Reseated the RAM in a different slot, something I didn't think of before. Didn't change anything. At what point does one throw everything into the dumpster and buy a brand new Alienware Aurora ALX?? *sigh* in my dreams
 
I had a very similar problem with an MSI Delta2 motherboard earlier this year. No matter what I did the computer would not get past the DMI Verification step when any hard drive was connected to the motherboard. It would boot just fine from CD if the only drive attached was the CD drive.

After spending a week fighting with the system I finally just got an RMA motherboard and the system has worked perfectly ever since.


However, since your system will boot when an old hard drive is connected but not when the new drive is attached, it almost seems like it might be a problem with the controller on the new hard drive. Do you have a separate PC you can plug the new drive in to for testing?
 
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