pc not powering up

JRJ · 3 Jul 2012 at 17:42

Appreciate the help

Ive got a silverstone da 1000 psu, last week it started having a noisy fan so ive pulled it out and giving it a blast of air and a hoover.

Built it backup and now its refusing tostart, it'll power up for a second before switching off, initially i thought the psu had failed but I've been doing some diagnosticsthese are my results

Jumping the green and black wire doesn't power it up

So plugged just the motherboard cable in and it powered up, so started plugging each cable back in one by one, turns out it works fine until my boot drive is plugged in! This was working perfectly before cleaning the power supply?

Any ideas?

JRJ · 3 Jul 2012 at 19:19

Any ideas anyone?

Orcvader · 3 Jul 2012 at 19:23

Sounds like part of the PSU is faulty. Giving it a blast of air and then hoovering sounds like you broke something. From the sounds of things it could be the 12v rail. Got another PSU you can try?

shadow_boxer · 3 Jul 2012 at 19:24

Are you plugging both motherboard power connectors in? (24 pin and 4+4 pin EPS). Clear CMOS and remove battery for 15 minutes.

I so I'd try removing the whole system from the case and building it like a test bench. Plug both motherboard connectors and a single stick of RAM. Try booting. No need for OS drive just yet. Can you get into the BIOS? If not try that memory module in another slot and do the same with the rest of the memory modules.

If your PSU doesn't turn on using the old paper clip trick (ie shorting the wires) then it's more than likely that's your problem.

mp260767 · 3 Jul 2012 at 19:27

tried attaching different power connectors to the boot drive, different sata cable/port ?

JRJ · 3 Jul 2012 at 19:49

Thanks guys

The psu runs perfectly until the boot drive is plugged in

Despite which cable i use and which rail it always fails when i plug the boot drive to the psu, when its removed i can get into bios and my other drive is seen!

To me its saying hdd failure but i can't see how as it was working and not touched when i pulled out the power supply, something shorting on the hdd?

mp260767 · 4 Jul 2012 at 09:29

seems valid that it might be a hd failure, bit of a weird one if i'm honest.

daft question, but can you just confirm when you say pulled it out, do you mean you disconnected everything from the psu and removed the psu from the case ?

Tealc · 4 Jul 2012 at 10:06

Sounds like an electrical short in the hard drive or cables. When powering up the PSU sees the short and refuses to power up, as it's supposed to.

If you are sure it's not the cables, and you need to check both power and data SATA, then there's not much you can do. You might be able to recover data by using a USB to SATA device, and hope the power supply for it isn't as fussy as PC power supplies.

JRJ · 4 Jul 2012 at 14:48

mp260767 said:
seems valid that it might be a hd failure, bit of a weird one if i'm honest.

daft question, but can you just confirm when you say pulled it out, do you mean you disconnected everything from the psu and removed the psu from the case ?

Yes that's all that was done the hdd drives weren't touched

Although i did get it to boot with just my storage drive its now refusing to start with any drives, what seems strange is they were working fine immediately before powering down and removing the psu.

do all sata drives work off the same rail and would a boot drive draw more power causing the power to cut? Dvd drives on a seperate sata lead and that powers up as does the mb and gfx.

Ive ordered a OCZ 600w just in case, im hoping it is a psu to be honest

JRJ · 27 Jul 2012 at 20:47

Sorry to drag up an old thread just thought I would update it.

Turns out my Silverstone PSU had decided it wanted to throw out 19v on the 5v rail which unfortunately took out both my backup and boot drives, both were 500gb Seagate Barracuda's. Completly stuck I searched the Seagate forums which suggested cutting out the damaged voltage protection diode this still didnt work.

I got pointed to a company in Canada http://onepcbsolution.com/ (I am no way affiliated with this company, just a happy customer, and their not a competitor) exchanged some emails with Kevin before sending the pcb over to them.

Basically they remove your firmware chip transplant this onto a refurbed board and send the pcb back, today I got my pcb back rebuilt the drive and bang works perfectly and I was able to back up the missing 6weeks of files I was missing off my external drive.

I was getting quotes of £600 for data recovery, total cost of this to me £38.60 to say I'm chuffed is an understatement, postage was 3weeks uk-canada-uk