Step right up...test your diagnosis skills here... 6

[wahnula]

Howdy Folks,

Just another steamy summer in Texas, with violent afternoon thunderstorms popping up as usual. The last one, on Tuesday, knocked the power out. No biggie, I have a great 2U online battery backup for my TiVo, another for the cable modem, routers and VoIP box, a third for the burglar alarm, and a fourth on my wife's PC.

All were fine and stayed on for an hour until the power came back...except the budget APC on my wife's rig. When I wiggled the mouse to bring it out of screen-save and shut the PC down, the 22-in LCD monitor came up, I started shutdown, and the UPS promptly ran out of juice and everything went down. Oh well.

When I tried to turn on the PC the next day, nothing. Nada. Zilch. No lights, no whir of fans, nothing. I tried all the tricks for troubleshooting dead PC, including disconnecting from the wall, holding the power buttons, and letting it sit unplugged overnight. I checked, there is 120 volts at the end of the power cable.

It's in a HTPC case which looks great but is less than easy to work on, I have a spare PSU that's exactly the same (Nexus 350-watt, DEAD silent!) that I plan to swap on Saturday, but I'd be interested to see what y'all have to say in the meantime. Place your bets, if you will.

Rest of the specs:

Asus P4S8X mainboard
Pentium 4 2.53 Northwood
1 GB Performance DDR RAM
Plextor DVD-RW
Lian Li card reader
Floppy drive (yes, I know, but it supplies RAID drivers nicely)
(1)-Maxtor 250 GB SATA drive

I'm banking on the PSU, any other ideas? Remember it shut down while the cheapo UPS died, so I'm thinking it was supplied with dirty, under-voltage brown power. The PSU does have PFC, but this might have been asking too much! Thanks all.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[edfair]

I didn't remember the density being that much, more like 25 platters. But it was also 40 something years ago. I remember 2 customers that had them in Atlanta, a steel company feeding a 1401 and the GM parts center with theirs hanging on a 1410. I'm assuming we are talking the same box, glass front and back, and vertical platter spindle in the top half of the cabinet.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[jurgen36]

:Edfair
Actually you do not need any support for the modern CF cards. All you need is an IDE channel, the IDE logic is build into any type 1 or type 2 card, this is in the agreed CF specifications. Sometimes the cheaper manufacturers cheat and do not fit the IDE logic. But any of the major companies follow the CF specifications. I used them now for a test in Unix, Linux, Mac and Windows machines. All the computer sees is another IDE drive. The puter does not even know its a CF card. Also the adapter has no logic at all, it just puts the right wires to the correct pins. So any machine which can use IDE can use them, the data rate of the Sandisk Ultra III cards is about 40 MB. So it compares favorable with hard drives. Actually its much faster as a drive, you do not have the delay of the heads to seek the correct position. Try them with a small one. On E-bay you can find IDE to CF adapters for about a dollar, 1 GB CF cards for 3 to 5 dollars. It will be a real eye opener I promise you. Not the snail speed of a USB II connection.
Try it
Regards

Jurgen

 

[jurgen36]

Some more info.
The CF drives actually do not work at a very high speed in a PCMI environment, they do work but very slow. But in a Lap Top its no problem at all. I replaced the 30 GB 2.5 hard drive in my wife IBM Lap top with a 32 GB compact flash and gained almost 40 minutes of battery use, also the machine boots up and is ready to use XP SP2 in about 8 seconds from a cold start. I used a 44 pin to 40 pin cable for the connection.
regards

Jurgen

 

[edfair]

Currently I'm 100% SCSI on my Unix stuff but I will build one IDE and see how it goes. Thank you for the info.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[tf1]

Did you forget to feed the hamsters?


Regards: tf1