Partition changed mysteriously by itseld? 1

[bartech]

Ok I have the following issues.

1.)
I booted up my cmoputer running Windows XP Pro SP2 and chkdsk appeared and scanned my 120GB Matrix drive which at the time was a Basic Partition. When everything was done, I couldnt access the drive in windows and it didn't appear in My Computer at all. I went to Disk Management in the Admin Tool folder and it was there although labelled "Simple" under layout and "Dynamic" under Type. I don't remember converting it to Dynamic.

2.)
My harddrives have been acting weird lately. 2 of them are connected to a PCI Promise card. Whenever I connect all my harddrives(i have 4 hdd's and 2 cd-roms) windows boots up but crashes - seems like it can't handle all of them. However when I unplug power from one, Windows works ok. Is this a Power supply Issue? I have a 420 Watt powering a P4 chip P4P4-x mobo, all those drives, audigy 2, radeon 9800 Pro 256, and a bunch of fans.

I'm stumped. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

 

[stduc]

Could be. But 420 watts seems plenty. You should be able to add up the wattages. Most devices have the wattage or current/voltage requirements stamped on them somewhere. Hard drives certainly do - although you may have to calculate the wattage.

At a rough guess if we said 100 watts for the mobo +cpu & 15 watts for the hard drives, 10 for the CD's and 5 for each of the fans (generous estimates) we come to 100 + 4*15 +2*10 4*5 = 200, leaving 220 watts for the audigy & the radeon. Which seems plenty to me.

However - if you have a cheap non-name PSU - that's a different issue as it probably can't handle the power surge at boot time. So you may not need a more poweful PSU, but you may need a better brand!

 

[Freestone]

A power supply calculator can be found here:

http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

I made some guesses at your system and it came up with 332 watts. There is plenty of room for error on this number because of my guesses.

Read the opening page before jumping right into the calculator. It has some good advice regarding supplies, especially in your case, the +12V line.

 

[bartech]

thanks guys, I'll go by the store today and pickup another powersupply - something better this time. Plus, where I shop they have a 7-day refind policy on everything so if that doen't solve the problem I always take it back.

And thast calculator program is pretty nefty. Thanks for the help guys.

/bart

 

[stduc]

Thanks for that calculator link Freestone.

 

[garebo]

Another issue here as well. You could have enough power with that power supply, but you could have a heavy demand in one area, say 12 volt. With a bunch of 12 volt fans running, and a P4 cpu and other 12 volt demands then your power supply may be fine with all the other voltage demands, like 5 volts, + and - 3.3 volts, but if its short on 12 volt then you are in trouble.

You can get a digital multimeter and test each rail (voltage line) and see if they are up to far. You can google a good tutorial on how to do this or you can to to techrepublic.com and use theirs, they also have a ton of other great downloads and info there as well, great tech place, not as good as this place but they have more tutorials.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips