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Would a bad Power Supply cause BIOS to not detect drives?

theknight571

theknight571

Platinum Member
Would a bad PS cause the machine to randomly reboot and cause the BIOS to not detect IDE drives (CDRom and/or HD)?

I was given a case complete with MB, CPU and memory... no drives. From what I can tell its one of these: CFI-S986

Originally I just wanted the memory... however it was not the right kind to fit my system.. so I figured I'd throw a CDRom and HD in and viola... a spare PC. 🙂

Initially it booted up fine, and detected the drives, but would not boot from the CD (the CDDrive I used had been flaky before, but was working when I pulled it from it's last home).

I put a different CDDrive in but the BIOS wouldn't detect it or the HD.

Put the first CDDrive back in... still notta.

Put the HD and CDDrive in working PC... they're still good.

Put the HD in the (S968) case and it booted to the windows installation that was on the drive... but rebooted before it fully loaded, and upon reboot, the BIOS would not detect the drive at all.

I spoke with the guy that gave me the case, he said he couldn't remember exactly since it'd been awhile since he used the case, but he thought it might have a bad PS.

Would a bad PS cause this behavior?
 
Absolutely.

The drive might get +12V so the optical door opens and closes and the HDD platters spin, but maybe it's not getting +5V so the logic of the drives isn't live.
 
Someone else was actually having similar, but opposite, problems with a DVD drive over in GH. Kind of baffled me since I usually assume it's a mechanical problem with the drive. He said that Windows was able to detect the drive, but that the tray seemed stuck and the light indicator was off.
 
Thanks for the responses.

I don't have a high end rig, and I have power supplies laying around here that would power it... but none of them fit in the case.

I'll look around for a replacement PS... but I'm not holding out hope.
 
Well you don't need it to fit into the case to wire it up. Try a spare PSU outside of the case first to see if that's what you need. It's easy enough to set it on the floor or hold it in your hand for a quick spin up test. I do it all the time with clients to avoid the hassle of screwing and unscrewing and navigating PSU's in and out all the time.
 
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