View Full Version : any body good at computer hardware
bought a new hard drive today but if i plug it in the computer fails to do anything. as soon as i unplug it it starts fine. its sata by the way on a gigabyte ds4 motherboard.
Smokey McPot
20-03-2007, 21:32
Probably set to master on the jumpers. Change it to slave or cable select and let it boot off the other disk first.
FlamingMonkey
20-03-2007, 21:34
^^ What he said
there no master slave on sata is there
FlamingMonkey
20-03-2007, 22:34
there no master slave on sata is there
Your right that will teach me to read the question first :P
Does the drive spin up in another machine?
AndyFielder
20-03-2007, 22:49
may have to enable sata support in the bias, may also need to install the sata bus drivers
drive is brand new and there,s already two off them running so enabled and drivers installed. just fails to switch on if i power the drive up.
AndyFielder
20-03-2007, 23:29
perhaps your PSU is too weedy..
happened with my old one till i got the monster thats in there now :D
no its also new a 500w enermax
remove the non windows drive and use the same cable and power to see if it fires up... if not I'd guess its faulty
If you can't get into the initial VGA bios screen AND you are running a power hungry VGA card. It could be that there are too many things connected to the 12V rail. Try unplugging the other drives/DVDROMs and see if it powers up to the DOS BIOS screen with only the new SATA drive. This would be an indication that you may need a new PSU with beefier 12V rail.
AndyFielder
21-03-2007, 01:01
sounds like a pretty decent PSU to me...
please explain what happens with the drive connected, once you press the power on button!
nothing. the button clicks but nothing starts. just won,t even attempt to load/boot
One more thing, if you enermax comes with multiple 12V. Try to make use of all of them equally.
AndyFielder
21-03-2007, 07:59
suspected PSU... and it boots fine without adding the new HDD
fasterthanjesus
21-03-2007, 08:38
remove the sata drives and install twin 5 1/4 floppies.
retro is where its at.
wont be the PSU, pretty sure of that. Enermaz 500w is more than enough these days
AndyFielder
21-03-2007, 09:55
Yeah... but all the simptoms are there.. :S
What's the hardware specs of the PC?
Processor, Video card, number of RAM stick. HD and optical drives.
Is the Enermax 500W, the Liberty, Noisetaker or an older model?
yeah unplug the new hard drive and its fine. writing this on it now. just fails to boot with it on. and its plugged on its own 12v rail and the power supply still has to spare. not running massive graphics and running core duo non hungry processor.
specs are core duo 6300 gigabyte ds4 2mb geil ram nvidia 7900gtx 2 x seagate 7100 320 gb hard drives enermax liberty ps all less than 3 months old. just won,t let me add a third hard drive.
I would guess it's a bad drive then. Plonk it into another PC to see if it does the same thing.
oh and 2 x samsung optical drives.
yeah haven,t got won two hand. will take it round my mates later.
nvidia 7900gtx 2 x seagate 7100 320 gb hard drives
That's still fairly high on the 12V, but should still comfortably power up with only an additional drive.
yeah. the liberty comes with eight power outlets and motherboard power. its got two for graphics cards i,m only using one and six for perp,s and i was using three with this now four.
Hmm... 5 drives spinning up at the same time may cause some problems for the 12V. Unplug the 2 opticals and run with only 3 HDs and see if it starts up.
ok unplugged both optical drives plugged in hard drive nothing. so it must be faulty cheers everyone.
ok unplugged both optical drives plugged in hard drive nothing. so it must be faulty cheers everyone.
Yup, I think so too. Sadly, brand new HDs DOA not uncommon these days.
thanks mate. will take it back then.
right had it in another machine and it works fine. really confused now.
Right so you have tried unplugging every IDE/SATA device from the board and just using the new drive?
Does the drive spin up when power is on? i.e. don't mount it in the machine just hang it outside and put you hand or ear on it
If it spins up but does not post, could be drive firmware + onboard controller incompatible but this is very rare these days
If it doesn't spin up = power problem.
Tried different cables etc?
@purple - 5 drives spinning up is nothing really on a 500w PSU. They draw around .35a on 12v and .75a on 5v each maximum.
Crap! And I was quite sure it was the drive as well.
At this point I would be googling for people with the same PSU model, mobo and drive who also experienced the same problem. Hopefully, someone had this problem and figured out a way round it. A more painful route would be to strip down the hardware bits until it boots and try to build it back up from that point.
@purple - 5 drives spinning up is nothing really on a 500w PSU. They draw around .35a on 12v and .75a on 5v each maximum.
Drives can chew up quite a bit of power on start-up though. IIRC, about 20W to 30W per drive for a short duration on spin up. I think it's closer to 2A on 12V when the motor spins up. But in any case, I don't think lack of spin-up power is the problem, as it would have booted when he removed the 2 optical drives.
Will probably be down to something silly, like cables or re-seating of cards & RAMs.
right after the shop said it worked. put it back in. fine now. how freaky is that.
right after the shop said it worked. put it back in. fine now. how freaky is that.
Looks like the freaky karma could be spilling over from the clio :) Keep your fingers and toes crossed and clean the gearbox earth just to be safe :D
also if you run xp repair does it delete lose all you installed software or just repair around it.
Can't help you there. I only use Win2k and Linuxes. Some XP user should know this.
BTW, here's is a good website to calculate roughly how much power your system consumes:-
http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp
cheers all running like a dream and 960gb of storage space now
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