Any Ideas? PC Power Supply or Serial Drive Failure?

[Miranda]

Hi,

My computer crashes, and then sometimes won't recognise the hard drive
on bootup for many hours. But then sometimes it will bootup again
immediately. When it does boot up again, it runs well in Windows and
all my data is recoverable (phew!). This is the second hard drive
that it has happened to.

I have a celeron (~> Pentium II) motherboard, and a power supply,
cables, etc that I bought as a package. It only had a single hard
drive and cd rom for many years and worked with no problems. I
upgraded the RAM and put in a cd burner as the secondary master drive,
setting the origindal cd rom as the secondary slave drive. This worked
well for a long while. Then, I put in another hard drive, except this
time I set the new drive as the primary slave and kept the original
drive as the primary master. This worked well for about four weeks.
Then, I started experienceing the problem I've described above. The
first thing that happened was the Bios didn't recognize either of the
slave drives (i.e. the new hard drive on the primary and the original
CD Rom on the secondary), although it had done so for the previous
month. I tried to isolate the problem and I discovered that whatever
drive was connected to the slave coupling on either IDE cable would
not get recognized by the BIOS. Okay, I thought, I'll just use the new
hard drive and throw out the old one and not bother with the CD Rom
but read off the new CD burner instead (hey, I'm Australian). This
worked well for about another month, which bring us to the present
moment.

Is there a problem, do you think, with my power supply?

 

[w_tom]

Until a 3.5 digit multimeter verifies those power supply
voltages within spec limits (and not at lower quarter of those
limits), then no one can properly answer your question. Doing
this measurement (not valid with motherboard voltage monitor)
is the first step to find and eliminate hardware
intermittents. Table of specs for testing in:
http://www.hardwaresite.net/faqpowersupply.html

Miranda wrote:

My computer crashes, and then sometimes won't recognise the hard drive
on bootup for many hours. But then sometimes it will bootup again
immediately. When it does boot up again, it runs well in Windows and
all my data is recoverable (phew!). This is the second hard drive
that it has happened to.

I have a celeron (~> Pentium II) motherboard, and a power supply,
cables, etc that I bought as a package. It only had a single hard
drive and cd rom for many years and worked with no problems. I
upgraded the RAM and put in a cd burner as the secondary master drive,
setting the origindal cd rom as the secondary slave drive. This worked
well for a long while. Then, I put in another hard drive, except this
time I set the new drive as the primary slave and kept the original
drive as the primary master. This worked well for about four weeks.
Then, I started experienceing the problem I've described above. The
first thing that happened was the Bios didn't recognize either of the
slave drives (i.e. the new hard drive on the primary and the original
CD Rom on the secondary), although it had done so for the previous
month. I tried to isolate the problem and I discovered that whatever
drive was connected to the slave coupling on either IDE cable would
not get recognized by the BIOS. Okay, I thought, I'll just use the new
hard drive and throw out the old one and not bother with the CD Rom
but read off the new CD burner instead (hey, I'm Australian). This
worked well for about another month, which bring us to the present
moment.

Is there a problem, do you think, with my power supply?