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...

 

[Zen216]

My guess would be the PSU...

 

[wahnula]

OK...that's one more for PSU. Odds-on favorite at this point, even-money bet.

Omitted gear: GeForce 6200 AGP graphics card

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[G0AOZ]

The PSU gets my vote as well...

I would imagine, although I've not seen the circuit diagram of a UPS, that the output voltage possibly decays somewhat more slowly than the sharp cut-off of a mains shut down. Particularly in a cheap device one could imagine perhaps a rather rough decay as circuitry loses its ability to maintain stability.

Just my thoughts Tony...

Good luck with it, and if we guess right it's beers all round on you!

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[wahnula]

Good luck with it, and if we guess right it's beers all round on you!

Sure, make it a double!

Apparently the APC UPS (the el cheapo that I use for this application) is only good for saving work if you're at the station during an outage. That's fine with me, I'll just hard shutdown next time. Tally: PSU-3, other components 0.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[edfair]

One more for the PS. Probablility above 80% but it can be the M/B itself, since the powerup is off a latch in the standby section.

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

 

[robmazco]

oddly enough I guess the humble and meek on/off power button that turns the bloody pc on and off...

 

[wahnula]

oddly enough I guess the humble and meek on/off power button that turns the bloody pc on and off..

OOOO!!! Someone breaks from the pack! Highly doubtful, as the case is less than a year old, but a brave guess nonetheless. Thank you edfair for chiming in in agreement as I was fearing M/B too...just a little bit, but enough to cause minor anxiety. I wish I had the time to swap the PSU sooner, but that ain't gonna happen with my schedule this time of year. Thanks for all replies.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[gbaughma]

Just for gits and shiggles.....

Try unplugging the PSU power from the mobo for a couple of minutes, then plug it back in and see if it powers up.

I've had to do that occasionally with machines...



Just my 2¢
-Cole's Law: Shredded cabbage

--Greg

http://parallel.tzo.com

 

[wahnula]

==>"Try unplugging the PSU power from the mobo for a couple of minutes, then plug it back in and see if it powers up."

Greg,

How about leaving it unplugged overnight? And holding the power button in all night while I slept???...OK I didn't do the second thing, but I did leave it unplugged overnight and held the power switch in for about 1 minute after I unplugged it.

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 also tried another AC outlet, in the event that the UPS had croaked.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[wahnula]

Give the man a cigar!!!

Y'all knew I couldn't let this issue hang...I found the time and it was the PSU. Stars for all our contestants tonight, y'all come back now, y'hear?

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[jim532]

just for future reference a UPS is not to necessarily supposed to keep you up and running durring a power outage. It gives you the oppertunity to shutdown in the proper manner.

 

[wahnula]

It gives you the oppertunity to shutdown in the proper manner

jim532,

Yes, Jim, I know that. What I was trying to do was shut down the PC properly. When I brought the PC out of standby a few minutes after the outage, it was still running. When the monitor came to life, that's when the UPS gave up and the PC shut down...and the PSU went kablooey.

It's not a smart UPS and has no auto-shutdown feature, so that's the reason I had to bring the monitor back up. Next time, that feature will be a MUST when selecting a UPS.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[jurgen36]

A similar thing happened to me. The power went off as I had a shower, apparently the UPS kept things going and then tried to shut down. By this time the voltage was too low. As I tried to restart the machine it would do nothing. I replaced the 750 watt power supply, still nothing. Further more investigation showed that 3 of my 8 drives had bad logic boards also one of the IDE and one of my SATA channels were us. All told it was a very expensive exercise. Fortunately the power company accepted responsibility and settled out of court.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[wahnula]

Further more investigation showed that 3 of my 8 drives had bad logic boards also one of the IDE and one of my SATA channels

OUCH!!!

Glad to hear the power company stepped up to the plate and paid off...but did they pay for data recovery services or just the logic boards? I backup frequently and didn't have any fear of data loss, just time (fixing the PC) and money (buying the new parts).

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[jurgen36]

Yes they did not pay for the data loss. I do have two backup drive systems they work on a rotating basic, on switch off they back all changes up and on next boot up the next drive array is turned on, you would think this is sufficient. Not so, one drive in each of my three raid zero arrays was busted. However I could reconstruct from a second computer system enough of my data so that I only lost about 3 days work. So backup should be on independent machines which are not connected. Well that's what you learn the hard way.

Jurgen

 

[edfair]

Isn't that the way life works, Jurgen. The best lessons are the ones you pay the most for.

But I'm not sure I want to trust my backup to disk drives at all. Maybe for first level defense, but at the highest level something optical with a copy off-site. And to occasionally make sure that there are other machines out there that can still read the optical stuff.

The concept is a hard sell to customers. But the one that was saved by a burned CD appreciated it.

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

 

[jurgen36]

:edfair
Yes, optical backup is ok up to a point. At the moment I use 32 GB compact flash cards, I had one spare IDE channel and added an IDE to CF adapter. The DVD or CD backup does not really give me enough space. I made a small slot in the case and insert the flash cards there. I was worried at first but Sandisk in their white paper showed that if you rewrite the complete flash card once every 10 seconds it will last for more then 300 years. Apparently they guaranty a write/read cycle of a minimum of one million times. Well we will see in 300 years ha ha ha. Anyway it seems to work this way very well indeed and is much much faster then dvd's or cd's. Also the cards are very small and you can put a dozen or so into a matchbox. Very soon they will even have CF cards in the terrabyte range, at the moment the prices are still quite high for the large capacity cards but you can buy 2 GB cards for less then 10 dollars. This will make hard drives obsolete. And good riddance, no more mechanical problems.

Regards

Jurgen

 

[edfair]

Unfortunately there is no support for the flash in the OS I most need the capabilities for. But for those that have the capability it is a winner.

I'm not sure that it will take 300 years to reach the benchmark in some applications. I'll wait for 3 or 4 years and see how things have held up.

I would like to see a marriage of ram and flash in a rotating drive replacement. Load the ram at powerup and use it as the drive then save it to the flash when shutting down. Couple that with all the SCSI I/O variations and I believe we would have a winner. RAMDRIVE speed with low power.

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

 

[wahnula]

...don't forget Blu-Ray drives at 25 gigs per disc single layer are right around the corner...and double-layer at 50 gigs a pop. Double-layer DVD never took off the way I expected but 9 GB media is less than $2/disc now.

I feel that Blu-Ray will get good penetration and pricing within a few years, but so will SATA flash drives. Hybrid drives are available now but will soon be replaced by solid-state drives. People will probably laugh about how we "used to have moving parts in our hard drives".

Remember the RAMAC 50-platter one-ton 5 MB original hard drive? That was not so long ago...

Tony

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