My PC died. Power or HD failure?
 

So I was happily working away on my desktop pc, when all of a sudden it dies. No shutdown, no reboot, just off.

Then it wouldn't boot. It would get past the device detection, and then turn off again.

Now I can't even get that far. I can get some power into it if I hold the on button.

First I suspected the worst, a HD crash. Now I'm thinking the motherboard could be fried or something, but I hope it's a power unit that needs replacing.

Has this happened to anyone in here before? What do you think it is?

BTW there's no funky burnt smell coming out of anywhere, and I'd feel safer if there was one coming out of the power supply.

I've checked connections, etc., everything is fine, and, as I said I was working at the time, there was no excessive overheating, I don't think.

Sounds like youre wrong on both occassions. I think you should check out your motherboard.

sounds like a power supply. i had to replace one last week

Check it how? It 'looks' ok. Smells ok...

What can I do to find out what is fucked here, aside from visually inspecting it?

First thing I would check (and this wasn't mentioned) is the fan. Does it still work and is it blowing? Also, is your computer inside clean of excess dust and dust bunnies?

If the system does not turn on after awhile, but the fan works, I would then look into the powersupply issue. After that, if that was ok, then I would think your motherboard is fried. As for the HD....if you have another hard drive somewhere, perhaps put that inplace of the existing one, and start the system up in dos...hope you have a startup diskette? Because if this works, then your drive was the culprit..which means reformat and and let me guess, you do not have any backups?

gotta love computers hey...

Sounds like the power supply

Check your power supply

Yeah, power supply or mobo.

Thanks for the reply.

Well, there is some dust inside the case, but I don't think it's a lot, really. The cpu fan still works. How can I test the power supply? There is still a bit of power coming out of it, if I hold the power button on, the cpu fan starts going, at least. But nothing stays on. I don't think it even gets up to starting to boot now. The power won't stay on if I'm not holding the on button.

As for the HD, I have two in there, both are bootable, so if one went down, supposedly the other should get booted, or in any case it seems irrelevant now that the bios doesn't even run.

I'm worried that it could be the motherboard, or even the CPU. If I put my head right in there, it does have a bit of unnatural 'stink' around the cpu and/or a row of transistors nearby on the motherboard.

So it seems to me that my data should still be safe, but could whatever happened have corrupted the drives anyway?

Maybe your power supply can't hand all the stuff you have on your system. what is the wattage?

Power Supply. Check that round battery on the motherboard also.

Yeah, it's a 300W supply, probably overdoing it, there's a radeon x800 running on it, 2 hard drives, and the high-end p4.

But I would have thought that if there wasn't enough power, things just wouldn't work? Well, they've been working in that config for about 5 months.

Damn. Well, I'll try to change the power supply but all I have is another old 300W one.

Thanks for all the replies so far

You would get error messages if your HD was fucked on bootup..you would also get a prompt to continue..Probably not the motherboard..how old is your computer?

It's about a year old. Yeah, no error messages came up at any time.

I'll try changing the power supply. It's not likely that the cpu is fried, is it?

Probably not..I would also suggest putting in another fan to cool your box even more..I had 2 power supplies go on me..common problem..I take it you leave yours on 24/7?

Check your power supply connection to the motherboard and look for burnt pins.

remove one of the HD and see if you ahve the same problem. I don't think 300W is made for 2 HD.

a 300w PS could definately handle that, depending on the quality of the unit itself. But more commonly not. The fact that you have to hold the button in to keep power makes me lean towards power supply as being the culprit as well. Try yer spare on the bare essential components.

If it's not a power supply issue, then it could be a cpu over heating issue.

Over heating is why I was thinking the fan (or fans) in the system if they were not working would soon heat your processor and board up and some systems have an auto shutoff for safety. A 300W supply should be more than enough for what you have, but when you say it has a "bit" of power, that alerts me to think perhaps your supply is defunct. Try the other supply you have and see if it works. But one other thing...if your system does get hot in there, the question will be, does it have enough cooling. As mentioned, if your system has a safety feature to shut down on excess heat, that might be the case. Just out of curiosity, is your computer built by you or a no-name brand company, or is it a brandname? Plus, what is your complete configuration and setup?

Hi everyone, thank you for the helpful information and good replies.

Today I threw in an old 300W power supply as a replacement, but also downgraded my graphics card to something that needs no extra juice (radeon 9200). The system works again. It was, afterall, a power supply problem.

I'm so glad that I didn't have to replace any main parts. Probably I'll buy a new power supply anyway, and also a proper cooling system. At the moment it just has the standard cpu fan on there, which seems to be useless.

Thanks again, and I'm happy you guys helped me get out of this without any major probs.

your lucky man, I had a power supply go out and it toasted my entire computer.. It fried 2 hard drives, a expensive graphics card.. along with all the other components.

Try replacing your power supply first, if no good. Then it must be your motherboard already.

hmmm... that must be motherboard or power