Help Please! Bad Start to the New Year!

[illpenguin]

Hey guys - i'm not sure whether this is in the right section of the forum..... I need some help with what I think could be a power supply issue with my desktop - but could pretty much be anything from what I know....

Started a few days ago when I installed my new power-hungry sapphire X1950 grahics card. All was well for the first 24 hours until my computer froze mid-game and all attempts to revive it (windows buttons... cnrl-alt-del etc) failed forcing me to turn it off at its main power button. At restart but computer attempted to boot from the wrong hard disk (it appeared the bios settings had been altered). I went to the bios to correct the boot sequence but now, during the windows boot sequence, my machine resets itself and offers to boot to safe mode - which it can do. It just refuses to complete the windows boot and restarts itself midway....

So I've installed windows on one of my other hard drives and am booting from there... weird thing is when I'm in windows every so often the system freezes in exactly the same way as the orginal incident...... forcing me to restart from the mains....

So at the moment I can boot to safe mode from my orginal hard disk and have a barebones version of windows that i'm currently booting from on another hard disk... with a computer that periodically freezes.... Crap! Oh and I can also see and access all my old files on the hard disk that I cant boot from....

Does this sound like a PSU problem (380W Antec Trueblue)/motherboard problem/hard disk failure??

I've disconnected as many devices as I can spare to try and ease any strain that there might be on my PSU...... The system hasn't hung since I've done that....

Please help because I'm really stuck!

Thanks!

ps. tried scandisk and fixing the 'bad' drive - didnt fix the problem

 

[WJA96]

It does sound like it could be PSU related. The only way to knlow for sure is to buy an oomphier PSU.

Sorry.

 

[illpenguin]

Balls..... My system seems to be more stable now i've unplugged some other hard drives etc.... Just worried i'm gonna fork out for a new PSU and it not fix the problem

 

[Jumping]

Have you tested the hard drives? If your drives starting to fail you might experience lookups.

If you run like the manufacturers hard drive check like seatools it should quickly (full test are rather slow.... ) tell you if its your drives or something else.

A mate of mine who had an Antec truepower had the same problem and it was his PSU on the way out. Also with you saying the system is more stable after you disconnected some hard drives kinda points to the PSU being overstrained.

You can usually overload the PSU for so long until it starts giving up the ghost and you start experiencing some problems which usually gets worse and worse, if you got data you don't want to lose I would recommend you to make sure you got backups as you might start to get data corruption of worse you might start to make your hard drives faulty.