I am fixing a rig that belongs to my wife's aunt and it's got a very unusual problem.
When it starts up the BIOS would not detect the hard drive (an older WD200 as in 20 GB) and actually would not even let you into the CMOS settings if the drive was connected. It just hangs at the Detectig IDE devices screen.
So I take out the drive and put in a USB enclosure where it works perfectly and I back up all the data just in case. Since the drive does work and I know it, I then assumed that the IDE controllers on motherboard were junk (it is a Biostar NF2 mobo-which I had a personal problem with before). I ordered a MSI NF2 mobo and got it today.
Same problem. Now I realize that the hard drive actually is not spinning up! It works fine in the enclosure, but not in the rig that it came from. Huh, weird huh?
UPDATE: I went to the drawing board and looked at what was different between the enclosure and the client's machine. Power supply, obviously-especially given that the drive wouldn't spin up. (I feel stupid that it took me this long, because when I first opened up her rig I was like "Damn another cheapo PSU.") Well, with the new PSU in there, it works just like new.
How strange is it to have a PSU that will power the mobo, CPU, memory, CD-Roms, and floppy, but not the HDD!? I even tried multiple molexes to see if maybe it was a bad plug, but they all worked on CDRoms and the hard drive wouldn't spin up with any of them!
When it starts up the BIOS would not detect the hard drive (an older WD200 as in 20 GB) and actually would not even let you into the CMOS settings if the drive was connected. It just hangs at the Detectig IDE devices screen.
So I take out the drive and put in a USB enclosure where it works perfectly and I back up all the data just in case. Since the drive does work and I know it, I then assumed that the IDE controllers on motherboard were junk (it is a Biostar NF2 mobo-which I had a personal problem with before). I ordered a MSI NF2 mobo and got it today.
Same problem. Now I realize that the hard drive actually is not spinning up! It works fine in the enclosure, but not in the rig that it came from. Huh, weird huh?
UPDATE: I went to the drawing board and looked at what was different between the enclosure and the client's machine. Power supply, obviously-especially given that the drive wouldn't spin up. (I feel stupid that it took me this long, because when I first opened up her rig I was like "Damn another cheapo PSU.") Well, with the new PSU in there, it works just like new.
How strange is it to have a PSU that will power the mobo, CPU, memory, CD-Roms, and floppy, but not the HDD!? I even tried multiple molexes to see if maybe it was a bad plug, but they all worked on CDRoms and the hard drive wouldn't spin up with any of them!