Topic: Dead PC! HEELP!!

[Cobra951]

NOOOO!  Shit SHIT!  I can't stand this.  I've never had a computer flat-out fail on me before, and I can't believe how much it fucked with my head.  I even got a nose bleed, something I usually don't get unless I eat too much chocolate or the air is way too dry.  God, I feel like I'm going to pass out.

It's the cheap box, so I guess I got what I paid for.  I heard a snap, like an electric arc, then the HDD light got erratic.  I was on the 360 at the time, so I switched the monitor over to PC display.  Nothing there.  No signal.  I held in the PC on button, and the light around it started to blink real fast, along with snappy sounds.  I turned it off, waited a bit.  I tried again, and it started to boot.  It didn't get very far.  Repeat process.  This time it got all the way into Windows, recognized external drives and everything. Then the display simply died.  The HDD light was constant-on.  I turned it off again, and this time I unplugged it.  I plugged it back in, and I noticed that the lights in the room dimmed for a split second.  After that, nothing I did to the on switch produced any results.

OK, my first thought is that it's the power supply.  Oh God, let that be all it is.  But I wonder if the motherboard is fried as well.  What should I do?  It's not like I have any test equipment, or spares for anything.  I need direction.  I have so much shit I depend on in this thing, and so much work to get it where it was that it's not even funny.  DAAAMN!

On a related note, anyone who can't tell the difference between integrated sound and the Audigy 2 has tin ears.  I'm listening to music on the game PC for the first time in ages.  Damn, it's good.  Calms the frayed nerves, just a bit.

[Ghandi]

Edit: Sorry that I'm no help. See original post for reasons why.

[Cobra951]

[Quemaqua]

That really sucks.  =(  I wish I had some helpful advice, but I'm ignorant about most of this stuff.  Far out of the PC repair loop these days.  I wonder if anybody has a spare power supply they could send you just so you could check.  I might be able to check one of the old PCs that may or may not still be in my mom's garage.  Would that be helpful?

[Ghandi]

That works too. Plus it's a little more legal. And economically viable, which I have realized within the past year. In other news, IRC. If you have a computer that works.

[Cobra951]

I appreciate the thought.  I'm thinking of taking the thing apart tomorrow, and maybe heading off to Microcenter with the PSU.  Maybe they can diagnose it, and if necessary, provide a replacement.  As long as it's not the HDD, which was my 1st horrible thought when I heard that first loud snap, I should be able to pick up the pieces.

The fact that it booted completely normally, then the display died to black (no signal, acually) tells me it's very unlikely the HDD is involved, unless of course a zillion volts got dumped into the delicate electronics by a dying PSU.  Then everything could be FUBAR.

Edit:  Really, though, any help or suggestions would be vastly welcome.  I guess there is a 1st time for everything.  I've always been very careful with electronic equipment, and it has always behaved itself for me, until now.

[idolminds]

I doubt its the HDD. They don't "snap" or sound like arcs, and they won't usually up and die. Bad HDDs tend to get noisy and have a grinding type noise for weeks/months before they die. So I highly doubt thats it.

Open the case and have a look inside. Look for anything darkened (arcing would be the cause). Does is smell like burnt electronics? Dont know if you know what that smells like...but you'll know it when you smell it. A snap sounds like something blew somewhere...PSU most likely. Also lights in the room dimming would indicate a shot PSU thats doing very bad things. No guarantee that the rest of the system is working, but the fact it booted to windows before totally going out is a good sign.

I wouldn't turn the thing on again until you get another PSU in there. Even a cheap one, just unplug unneeded items if it cant power everything (CD drives, sound card, even a stick of RAM)...just enough to see if it boots.

Cliffs:
HDD should be ok.
PSU most likely blown.

[Ghandi]

When my HDD died a year ago, it made clicking noises. For a year. I ignored them. And then it died.

[Quemaqua]

Mine made no noises at all, but Windows started taking aaages to boot, and eventually only booted intermittently... then eventually wouldn't boot at all.

But yeah, let's hope it's just the PSU.  I'll keep my fingers crossed.

[Cobra951]

Thanks idol.  My fear is that I may have fucked it up further by my repeated attempts.  Oh well.  Tomorrow is another day.  (Thank you, Vivian Leigh.)

[gpw11]

I'm fairly certain that when my power supply went a little while ago it was accompanied by a snap/pop kind of sound.  The thing is that even if it is just the power supply that went, it could do damage to the other components as it goes. 

If you have a gaming box and the pc in question couldn't you swap out the power supplies just to check?  Or, couldn't you transfer the HDD from the damaged one into the gaming pc in order to check to make sure you didn't lose everything there?

[Cobra951]

My other PC is stuffed to the gills.  What I could do is drop it into an enclosure and plug it into a USB port.  That would take some work.  Or swap out a drive . . . wait, I think I may have a spare slot.  I do have a PC-bus controller card in there.  Not sure about Y connectors, though.

[Pugnate]

Cobra open the yellow pages and look up a clone PC store. Take it there and have them swap parts out till they figure out which part is faulty. It sounds like it could be anything, but hopefully is the PSU.

[Cobra951]

That's a great suggestion.  Thanks.  You have enough to worry about for one day, though.  Ignore my puny problems.  Really.

Edit:  Oh shit.

[scottws]

Looks like it is already pretty well narrowed-down, but I concur with everyone else.  Almost surely PSU, maybe motherboard, probably not hard drives.  Expansion cards... maybe.  Memory... probably not, but maybe.

[Cobra951]

OK, I think I'm about to throw in the towel.  I got what looks like a perfect replacement for my PSU.  Same size, wattage, and plugs.  Everything hooked up and screwed in perfectly.  I had a 6-pin "AUX" plug and a molex plug leftover.  I attached the basic peripherals, saw the 115V setting, plugged it in, pushed the rocker switch from O to I, and pressed the PC's front-mounted power switch.  Nothing!  No fans, no lights, nada.  I unplugged it and used the power cord that came with the new PSU instead.  Nada.  CRAP!

There has got to be a way for me to verify this PSU is working without plugging it into what may or may not be a fucked-up mainboard.  It would be nice to know if the original PSU is also intact.  What can I do at this point?  Boo hoo!  I need a hug.   

[WindAndConfusion]

I had a very similar problem several weeks ago. A faulty HDD shorted, killing my power supply. I got a new PSU, but so long as it was still hooked up to the faulty drive, it wouldn't give me any signs of life. Cutting the power, disconnecting the drive, unplugging the PSU from the wall socket (to bring it out of fault mode) and then plugging it back in fixed the problem.

System has worked ever since.

[Cobra951]

Oh shit.  That would be the worst possible component to fail.  I was considering getting an external enclosure for it, so I could at least get to the data.  Son of a bitch.

Thanks.  I'll check it out.  I still have the original HDD for this thing in a moving box somewhere.

[WindAndConfusion]

It might not be your HDD that failed. Any component that connects directly to the PSU could be faulting it. You should also check optical drives, fans, and maybe your video card.

Or maybe now you have two dead PSUs. But my recent experience says that's unlikely.

[Cobra951]

I ended up unplugging everything, although I didn't disconnect the ribbon cable from the optical drives.  The HDD ribbon did get pulled off.  I still get nothing.  I did notice a quick dimming of the lights in the room when I turn on the rocker switch, which has "fault" written all over it.  Goddamn it.  Don't know what to do.  If it's the mainboard, then the hell with it.  I'll pull everything worthwhile off of it and use it somewhere, later.  This would be preferable to a dead 160GB HDD.  I have years of stuff on there, much of it personal and valuable, like pictures of my children, documents, music.  If I can get into that, I'll live with the loss of the POS box.

[gpw11]

Well, even if you can't get into it there are very expensive data recovery options.  I don't know much about the process they use to pull the data off of dead and damaged hard drives, but I have a feeling the markup is just retarded.  Maybe see if you know anyone with any experience with this.

[scottws]

The hdds are probably fine.  Throw the drive in another system and see what you get.

[Cobra951]

Yeah, I'll tackle that option one way or another.  I'm thinking enclosure because this PC is crammed full of stuff and it's still XP with no service packs.  I think that means no 48-bit addressing (137 GB partitions max).  The hardware needs to be compatible with that too, and I don't know if it is.  External enclosures do their own thing, so as long as they can handle the size, it should all work.

[gpw11]

we can talk about your service pack woes on irc if you wish.

[Cobra951]

Sure.  I got a USB 2.0 PCI card at Microcenter when I got this PSU.  It would be nice to be able to use it.  I have, um, some software too, but I've been, ah, reticent about it.

[WindAndConfusion]

Speaking of hard drives, they're here: 1 "terabyte" drives. (Of course, manufacturers are notoriously full of shit, so it's actually more like 940GB.) "500" (470) GB drives have fallen to the Magic Price Point of ~$100.

[Cobra951]

A decimal terabyte is 99,511,627,776 bytes shy of a real terabyte.  The lie is that big.

[Pugnate]

Yea I remember the arguments I've had with sellers on the hard drive size lies.

[Cobra951]

Yeah, I'll tackle that option one way or another.  I'm thinking enclosure because this PC is crammed full of stuff and it's still XP with no service packs.  I think that means no 48-bit addressing (137 GB partitions max).  The hardware needs to be compatible with that too, and I don't know if it is.  External enclosures do their own thing, so as long as they can handle the size, it should all work.

OK, success, with the HDD anyway.  The PC is a lost cause.  This morning I attached the 2nd PSU I got at Microcenter, and I still get absolutely no sign of life from anything.  Back it went, and I got a $24 USB external enclosure while I was there.  I pulled the HDD from the dead machine, plugged it into the enclosure, closed it up and attached it, yes!  It's all still there.  I'm copying the 39-GB "My Documents" folder over to a 320-GB external drive right now, just in case.  That has all my documents (oddly enough), all my pictures and all my music.  Now I have over 1 TB total hooked up to this computer.  8 hard drives!  5 are external, with 2 on firewire and 3 on USB.  I'll probably remove one 80-GB USB drive soon, though.  I'll dump whatever I want out of it into one of the bigger ones, then put it away as a backup.  I'm up to "S:" on the drive letters.  Haha!  There's optical drives, virtual drives, and a memory-card reader using up the alphabet too.

[scottws]

You really love those external drives, don't you?  I much would prefer the speed of SATA or IDE that an internal drive would give you over USB 2.0.

I have an external hard drive, but I only use it if I am taking a class that uses a bunch of virtual machines.

Why not just get a 500 or 750 GB internal drive?

[Cobra951]

This last one was a matter of necessity.  I had 3 years of stuff on the dead PC.  I needed to get at it without risking the other system.  Plus it's full up anyway.  The other drives just sort of accumulated over the years.

No SATA for me without starting from scratch.  EIDE only, which if I'm not mistaken maxes out at 133 Mbps.  Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 are hardly the bottlenecks at 400 and 480 Mbps max, respectively.  (And there's an external standard for SATA too: eSATA, at 3 Gbps.)  Windows allows me to buffer the drives as if they were internal ("optimize for performance" under device manager).  I don't have problems running games (appropriate to the PC's internal limitations) from my external drives.

Besides, I like the idea of having my mass storage be independent of the PC.  This last bummer of an experience with my cheap PC only reinforced that.  Whatever data I happened to have stored externally to it I was able to access immediately.  It took weeks of wading through hardware frustrations to finally get to the internal drive (now external to the surviving PC).

[scottws]

I have USB 2.0 and a USB 2.0 drive.  Copying a large file to and from the drive is MUCH slower than copying the same file to my other hard drive.  I just don't see any reason to make the trade-off at all, especially if portability isn't a consideration, and especially since internal drives are just cheaper anyway (yeah you can buy enclosures but you are just adding cost onto the internal drive).

As far as eSATA goes... I'm aware of it, and I have a port.  I'd definitely get an eSATA-compatible enclosure at this point.  But I'd still only go external if I needed the portability.

As for taking weeks to find out it was the hdd, I suggested weeks ago that the hdds were probably fine and to try them with another system.  I could see avoiding replacing a motherboard... that's a bitch.  But a hdd is 2 cables and 2-4 screws.

Is it easier to simply take an external drive and move to another system?  Yes.  But it's hardly a burden to move an internal drive.

[Cobra951]

Maybe I wasn't clear enough.  My one and only remaining PC is crammed to the gills already.  It has 3 hard drives and 3 optical drives.  There's a PCI-to-IDE card in there to support the extras.  I do remember you saying the drive was probably OK.  What took weeks was 90% me shuffling my feet, 8% getting and trying 2 different PSUs (to no avail) and 2% getting and using an external enclosure for the drive.

On top of that, as I said before, my system most likely cannot deal with a 160 GB partition internally.  XP has no SPs, and it's possible that the motherboard or BIOS can't support 48-bit LBA either.  My only safe option which doesn't involve major reshuffling of internal components was the way I went.

I looked it up and the bits/bytes ambiguity screwed me up.  USB 2.0 is 60 MB/sec (480 Mbps) and Firewire is 50 MB/sec (400 Mbps).  UDMA 5 access to EIDE/UATA drives is up to 100 MB/sec (800 Mbps).  I think this is what my system uses internally, so yeah, it's about twice as fast as firewire and maybe 80% faster than USB 2.0.  (UDMA 6 is 133 MB/sec.)  I don't know what the drives themselves are capable of.  I guess I can always perform a test here, such as move a 4.35-GB DVD rip from one internal drive to another, and time it.  Then I can time it going to and from an external drive.

I have no question that SATA leaves all my stuff in the dust.  I need a new PC from the ground up to get there.

Edit:  I looked in device manager, and sure enough, my primary IDE channel used UDMA 5 access.  However this review of my best internal drive reports a transfer speed of 49 MB/sec, or just shy of what the firewire 400 pipe can deliver, and a good 11 MB/sec below what USB 2.0 can deliver.  So again, I see the transfer technology difference as a non-issue for my generation of hardware.  I still plan on doing some transfer tests at some time, though, since the conversation now has me curious about it.

Edit 2:  I looked at the drive tests again.  I missed the fact that 49 MB/sec transfer is only the top end of it.  At the other end it's 29 MB/sec.  Hard drives spin at a constant angular velocity, so of course, performance is best at the outer track and worst at the inner.  So on average, it's not even close to saturating the pipe.

[WindAndConfusion]

Also, USB external drives can be connected to routers and networked.

And they can be used with laptops.

And short of a gigabit LAN connection, they're the fastest way to transfer very large amounts of data.

And there's a limit to the number of drives you can cram into a case.