So my power supply died.

And one of my drives may have also kicked the bucket with it.


Ever since I rebuilt my system a year or so ago, I found that it ran fine, except when I went to reboot it, at which point it would usually, but not always lock up at the bios screen and require another try. I keep my system powered up 24/7, so this wasn't really an issue. Though on exceedingly rare occasions, I'd get up in the morning only to find my computer had rebooted and was stuck at the bios screen. And lately, I'd had intermittent lockups, when otherwise XP has generally been perfectly stable.

The power supply I had in the system was a 500 watt, which the guy at the PC shop that sold me it insisted was more than adequate for the job of powering a Geforce 8800 GTS, 5 hard drives, a DVD rom, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+, a creative Soundblaster X-FI, a firewire card, and an ATI video capture card.

I don't think I should have listened to him though.

I just purchased an Antec 680 watt power supply, and I noticed when comparing specs to a BFG 680 watt supply that not all power supplies are created equal.

The Antec I picked up ($110 on sale) not only had more connectors, but also had three +12 volt rails, whereas the BFG had only two. Also, the Antec can put out a max of 540 watts total on those three rails, whereas the BFG could only output 456 watts.

In case you're a bit confused, hard drives, PCI express cards, even your CPU, all use 12 volts. And a "rail" is a group of cables which use the same electronic "fuse" which will shut down the power supply if too much load is placed on them. For safety reasons, each rail has been limited to 240 watts, so a supply with only two rails could only safely put out 480 watts total on the 12v lines*. And that's why the Antec can put out more 12v watts than the BFG.

(* Though Wikipedia says that multiple rails are being phased out because it's inconvenient for users to spread the load out, and there hasn't been a significant increase in fires with those PSU's who have chosen to ignore that requirement.)


Anyway, about that drive that might have failed. Yesterday when I thought my power supply had failed I went looking for one but couldn't find one that had the swappable connectors my old one had which I liked. So I went home and tried to boot my PC again but it got stuck at the boot screen, and one of my drives was clicking. I disconnected that drive and tried booting again and the PC worked for a while, but locked when I tried to access a drive. It booted again, but when I powered it down a second time to try to hook up the clicking drive and get my data back, it wouldn't power up at all again even after leaving it off for several hours again.

So, I don't know if the drive was clicking because it couldn't get enough power because the PSU was failing, or whether the drive was failing anyway. It's been one of my noiser drives since I installed it, and I have two of that model and if I remember one was running hot accoridng to a temp testing program I'd used once, but I don't know which one that was. Anyway, I got a new 750 gig Seagate drive for $170 on sale as well, and in a few minutes I'm gonna try booting with the old drive attached and see if it'll work. Then if it does work, just to be safe I'm gonna pull my data off there and stop using that one, since I really don't want to have SIX drives in my system. (Though I have enough connectors to do that.)

I'll let ya know how things go. Hopefully the old drive wasn't what fried the PSU in the first place!

mine when i first got it had this annoying habbit of reseting iself every odd CD, so id be ripping a stack of disc's but giving up after the 4th cos it had already reset itself twice, i never did find out why and ive not tinkered with it per-se, the most ive doen was disconect the dvd to use the cable for my old pc hard drive when i data dumped, but iir it was still doing the disc insert reboot trick after i plugged it back in

Update:
Well, turns out that hard drive is in fact dead. It may even have even burnt up one of the components under the PCB because a bit of it looks a bit brownish.

Luckilly, that hard drive, a 200 gig Western Digital, used to be half of a pair that were in a RAID setup, and the other drive was also in use in my PC.

If I'm not mistaken, drives generally need to be identical to be put in RAID setups. More importantly, the two drives look identical board wise, and all the numbers on them match up... except for one number which is stamped into the metal of the drive which is slightly different.

So... the current plan is to copy all the data off the good drive, and then swap the board in it with the bad one, and see if that lets me pull the data off the bad drive. I found this nifty program for doing that called TeraCopy. It copies files much faster than explorer and skips those which fail. At least that's the idea. I don't know how long it's supposed to wait to skip a file, but it skipped a bunch while I was out, and then it got stuck on one while I was watching it, and trying to skip it manually caused the program to lock up. But luckilly it has a skip all duplicates feature so it won't have to recopy all that stuff it was copying for an hour when I get it restarted here in a few moments.

Btw, one interesting thing to note is that when I plugged in the bad drive, it went click click as usual, but when I got into Windows, it detected new hardware and said the new hardware was WDC ROM MODEL HAWK with 8gb of storage space. Kinda weird, but seems other people have seen that same thing when their Western Digital drives fail. Nobody seems to know what it really means though, ie, whether it means the disk failed physically or on the hardware side.

But my guess is that it's not meant to help diagnose the problem at all, but what it's really telling me is that it is in fact, a hardware failure rather than the platters being scratched. And that bodes well for my plan to switch out the board to get the data back.

500w PSU for all that jeezus, I would go for a 800W+ for that setup

I think 650 will be sufficient. Like I said, it was very stable 99% of the time. I'm not even sure 500 wasn't sufficient. The hard drive I just bought, on average, draws around 13 watts. But if my calculations are correct may hit peaks as high as 35 watts.

Five drives x 35 watts is still only 175 watts. On the other hand, the 3D card and the CPU draw a lot. So maybe the power supply was just faulty, or maybe drives draw more than usual on bootup and pushed it over the limit. Who knows. I didn't really have a choice though in getting the 650 PSU, the computer store where I usually buy components isn't open on saturday or sunday and I wasn't paying $65 more for a 700 watt "rocketfish" brand power supply when the 500 lasted a year without croaking, and I'm pretty sure 150 more watts should do the trick if too little power was in fact the issue.

Anyway, just got the good drive copied over to the new drive, so now I'm off to swap the board and see if I can pull the data off the bad drive.

Woohoo! Sticking the good board on the dead drive appears to have done the trick. I can see the files in explorer and the file copy program is indexing them right now for the copy which will probably take about an hour.

i would agree that two drives of identical size and make would be board swappable even with this minor difference in the pcb as its unlikely that the ammount of platters etc would be different

if it was a 250gb and a 275gb drive then im not too sure

data loss always sucks
thats always worth 10X if not more than the price of the pc itself

no one wants to loose their digital photos and home video's yet we dont seem to back them up as much as we should
you can afford to loose "my music" as thats just stuff ripped from CD's but a musician would hate to loose the 24 track files of their latest album

best of luck with the data

edit:
your above post wasnt on when i first started typing ... im not slow typing i just ended up getting sidetracked ;)

fantastic to know its fine :)

Oh I have the important stuff like photos and code backed up on a second drive.

I started doing that after my dad brought me a drive his girlfriend's family had had disney photos on only to have it become corrupted, and then formatted. I managed to save the photos with a program called File Scavenger. It was the only one I could find which would work under those sorts of conditions. It saved all the photos.

The only stuff I would have lost to this would have been a mess of downloads and a copy of my program files directory from the last time I reinstalled windows. But I do save stuff in my program file directories, so I would have lost stuff like old 3D models I'd made that I can't be bothered to back up.

As long as Bunnyblast was backed up... :)

You know, I don't know if I have that backed up or not. :-) My old DarkBasic stuff isn't exactly on my high priority list of things to worry about.

..man..computers these days sucking so much power...