Power Supply Question

[Crazybob]

Had my work PC go down yesterday. Just quit right in the middle of something and tried to reboot. Looked like a HD failure since it would reboot, but not find the OS. Checked all the connections and tried multiple times to reboot, even did the soft tapping on the HD to see if I could coax it. Unfortunately I didn't have it do the automatic restore point, so nothing to fall back on. After 1.5 hours, I took it to our IT department to let them throw another HD in there and load all there little special BS so I could get it back online and crunching MW on the 5870 in there. Checked back with them today and they said it was the power supply? Had no indications that the PS was bad. All the bells and whistles worked, except it wouldn't recognize the HD. Running Windows 7, with a 500GB SATA drive. The IT guy said it wouldn't start up. Is it possible that the PS was going and the 1 leg the HD was on went bad first? Never had one go that way and I don't have a lot of confidence in our IT Department.

[Mumps]

Not a 'spert on this, but IIRC, HD's are one of the few remaining components of a computer that require +/-12v for the mechanical pieces. So if you lost that, it may be reasonable for the drive to not be able to spin-up, but the rest of the electrical things to work...

[Dandasarge]

Its not highly likely but it is possible that the that the inverter that the rail is on started going out. Not much on the smaller power supply's do it but most larger ones do it that way so they can use cheaper components anytime you see a power supply with different amps they have different rail inverters. They can go out and everything will work but what is on that strip.

[rgathright]

Had my work PC go down yesterday. Just quit right in the middle of something and tried to reboot. Looked like a HD failure since it would reboot, but not find the OS. Checked all the connections and tried multiple times to reboot, even did the soft tapping on the HD to see if I could coax it. Unfortunately I didn't have it do the automatic restore point, so nothing to fall back on. After 1.5 hours, I took it to our IT department to let them throw another HD in there and load all there little special BS so I could get it back online and crunching MW on the 5870 in there. Checked back with them today and they said it was the power supply? Had no indications that the PS was bad. All the bells and whistles worked, except it wouldn't recognize the HD. Running Windows 7, with a 500GB SATA drive. The IT guy said it wouldn't start up. Is it possible that the PS was going and the 1 leg the HD was on went bad first? Never had one go that way and I don't have a lot of confidence in our IT Department.

So the hard drive is bad or is it the PSU?:-t

I would ask for the old hard drive back so you can try to boot her up on another computer. If it works... then all your files are safe.

If the PSU is bad, did they replace it?

Sorry for the attitude but as an IT person, I would never let someone reinstall my OS without first knowing they tried to recover my data by placing the drive in another computer! :rolleyes:

[John P. Myers]

So the hard drive is bad or is it the PSU?:-t

I would ask for the old hard drive back so you can try to boot her up on another computer. If it works... then all your files are safe.

If the PSU is bad, did they replace it?

Sorry for the attitude but as an IT person, I would never let someone reinstall my OS without first knowing they tried to recover my data by placing the drive in another computer! :rolleyes:

Odds are your hard drive is perfectly ok. PSU's going out tend to cause this sort of behavior. i know it sounds strange, but it really does happen this way :) With a new PSU, you can probably keep your old HD exactly as it was. It's possible your BIOS may not recognize the OS partition anymore too, so beware you may have to reinstall the OS after your PSU is replaced.