PSU blown....bit of help?

Nazbit

Nazbit

Nazbit

Soldato
Joined
11 Dec 2004
Posts
3,871
Hi all,

Well my PSU blew this morning, Ive swapped it with a PSU from another pc for the moment, but what I want your help with, is determining which components the PSU has fried.

When I switch on with the new PSU it boots fine up until it scans for sata devices, at this point I get the, "System disk not found, check cable" message.

So Im guessing that the hard disk has been cooked by the PSU, but is there any chance that it could be a problem with the motherboard?

Does the fact that the system will boot this far mean that the ram and the motherboard are ok and its just a problem with the hard disk?

Any help would be greatly recieved.

Cheers
 
Jaffa_Cake said:
What was the PSU that died on you?

Generally it shouldn't fry any hardware unless you are unlucky.
Click to expand...

It was a cheap competitors own make psu.

It just went with a pop and burning smell as I went to switch it on.

And now im getting boot errors so I think it has definatley done some damage, Im just trying to work out the extent of it.
 
Last edited:
Will_3rd said:
you tried a different IDE/SATA port? or tried the HDD in a different PC?
Click to expand...

I have tried the HDD in a different SATA port on the same computer.
There is also a slight burning smell from the green PCB and the underside of the HDD, and I cant hear any spinning.

At the moment I dont have the capacity to test it in a different machine.
 
Ok, Ive put a windows disk in the drive and booted up and it boots from the CD ok, but then set up terminates because it cannot find a hard disk.

Although I obviously need a new hard disk,

Does this suggest the motherboard and ram are ok?

Would I be able to get this far if there were problems with them?
 
With the RAM it is difficult to say as nothing is being written to it due to the setup procedure terminating at the beginning.

By the looks of things it seems ok as ** not getting any error beeps pointing to the RAM so the only way you can be sure is by testing it.

A while back i bought a stick of 512MB PC133, and whenever i tried to install anything it would start fine, then i would get either a BSOD or restart, pointing to the RAM being the problem as whenever the installing program (Quake 3 Arena in this case) tried to write to the RAM, it crashed.

It looks to me that your Mobo has come away unscathed, have you checked for any burn marks on it at all?
 
Ok thanks for all of the input,

As it stands now, I think that the HDD and one of the DVD drives has been cooked, hopefully the motherboard is good but there is still a question mark over the ram.

Out of interest what could have caused something like this in the first place?

Is it just a random failure of the PSU or would it be a power surge or something similar? (although there is a surge protector on the plug socket)
 
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