[olug] Fun with hardware -or- how I fixed my wife's PC.

[Ben Dinger]

In my experience, bad PSes can cause all kinds of crazy problems.  

Probably it was either a bad cord going to the drive, or for some reason not giving the drive enough power.  Or the PS could have been failing in general.  

Hence my recommendation to those building machines: always buy the most expensive/best power supply you can afford.  Enermex, Antec, and Thermaltake all have excellent PSes.  Also, always go 100 watts over what you think you need, most PSes don't ever hit their rated wattage.  

Anyway, yeah.  I've had crazy stuff happen with PSes before.  Like at work, a dying PS in one of my webservers caused the RAID controller to randomly crap out.  Or an employee who's PC would lock up at completely random intervals.  Or or or... :) 

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 09:01:20AM -0500, Jon H. Larsen wrote:
> Fun with hardware -or- how I fixed my wife's PC.
> 
> My wife's PC started having problems a couple weeks ago.  I was receiving 
> timeouts with /dev/hda with a Fedora Core 2 install.
> 
> Suspecting the hard drive was failing, I booted up with the Fedora rescue 
> CD and moved her home directory to my PC as a backup, and so she could 
> continue to log in and check her email.  I placed an order for a new 
> drive from newegg.  Not a bad idea, as the hard drive in her PC was 
> manf. in 1997, so it wasn't un-expected to show problems soon.
> 
> I had to order a new drive for my myth box anyway, which had the root 
> os drive fail on me the mid-Sept., so I ordered two.  The drives 
> arrived in the mail, two nice Seagate 80 GB 7200 RPM, nice and quiet 
> compared to the old 13 GB ATA33 Maxtor that was 'failing'.   (The 10 GB 
> drive in the myth box that failed was also a Maxtor).
> 
> Powered up the system to install FC2, same timeout issues occurred.  I now 
> suspected the cables and motherboard.  Both the cables and motherboard 
> were only four months old.  Replaced the IDE cables, same problem.
> 
> So, I ordered another motherboard for her system, thinking the chipset 
> had fried.  I have seen this happen before on other system where the 
> motherboard chipset fan had failed, and the chipset burned up.  I got a 
> Micro-ATX from Gigabyte, with the same chipset as the previous board, a 
> KM400.  Before installing the new motherboard, I changed out the 
> original chipset heatsink, which was about 1 CM high, with a Zalman 
> NB47J about 4.7 CM high, not wanting the chipset problem to re-occur.  
> At $4.99, the Zalman heatsink is a good performance upgrade, so I bought 
> two, one for my PC.
> 
> I replaced the motherboard and the Problem remained.
> 
> So, here I was - new motherboard, new hard drive, new drive cables, 
> swapped out the optical drives for some from my old mythtv box 
> (DVD-ROM, 24X CDRW) - still at the same point of failure.
> 
> So, I replaced the only thing I hadn't swapped out yet, the power supply.  
> I took out the Antec 330 Watt unit, and used the spare Antec 330 Watt PS I 
> had from my previous myth box build. 
> 
> Issue resolved.  
> 
> Installed FC2, no problems.
> 
> So, technically, the 7 year old 13 GB Maxtor is probably fine.  I'll have 
> to test it with the ultimate boot cd utils.  The motherboard is probably 
> fine too.  Slap a new processor in and some memory, and I'll have a new 
> mythtv frontend for the living room.
> 
> 
> Guess I should pick up a Power Supply tester, huh?  Suggestions anyone?
> 
> Jon L.
> 
> -- 
> Jon H. Larsen  - email: relayer (at) levania (dot) org
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-- 
Ben Dinger
ben at mac-geek.com
"The Pope?  How many divisions has he got?" --Josef Stalin