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I'd known it was coming for a while. At least two years, in fact, ever since we had to do the graft after the last failure, but it was still a terrible moment when it happened.
That's right, folks: the PSU in my desktop finally died.
It was a hard worker, that one. A semi-modular Raidmax 630w unit, it did an admirable job powering my behemoth of a rig (in size, not necessarily power.) The "graft" in question was when we had to strap a 120mm case fan to the outside of the thing after its internal fan simply fell apart one day. It will be missed.
It will also, however, be cursed. As of the time of writing this blog my main rig has been down for a week. I received a replacement PSU in the mail yesterday -- a 550w semi-modular Corsair -- but it seems my problems might be worse than I had expected since, after installation of the new unit, I seem to have no SATA ports and, therefore, no HDD access.
There are a few things that could be happening here:
1. With the death of the old PSU and the long downtime resulting from it, I might need to do a CMOS reset to get things to work correctly again. This is annoying but also my best case scenario: I can't re-enable them via the BIOS, so I'm hoping the BIOS reset will knock bug loose or something.
2. The failure of the power supply might have fried my hard drives. While this would mean the rest of my rig is salvageable, it WOULD mean that my idiocy in Not Backing Things Up for about a month would lose me significant progress on a few stories/books I've been working on as well as a lot of work on music projects. This would be my Worst Case Scenario as far as data goes.
3. The failure of the power supply might have fried my SATA ports. If this is the case, there are a few workarounds, such as picking up a PCI-E SATA controller or a pair of external USB enclosures for my drives. Both of these options cost money I can't afford given my current state of unemployment.
So here we are. Luckily my cousin hooked me up with a lappy a couple of weeks back for unrelated reasons, so I still have 'net access, but the lappy is far weaker than my desktop was and, given the aforementioned idiocy of Not Backing Things Up, does little to help in regards to my data access. Plus it's running Linux so there's that. It's a great OS, don't get me wrong, but I had Windows on the desktop for a reason.
Hopefully this weekend I'll have a better idea of what's going down and whether I'll be out no more money, a little more money I really shouldn't be spending, or down a rig 'til I can basically buy a new one. The thing posts and I can get into my BIOS, but . . . yeah.
So, wish me luck. In the meantime I'm still working on a couple of new writing projects via the Lappy that, if I can be diligent, I can hopefully foist off on Erin by the end of the month to finance both more time at home and possibly building a new rig. We'll have to see.
Y'all like stories about musicians right? 'Cause that's what one of these is.
Melanie E.
Comments
Good Luck!
It’s likely that your MB would fry before your HDs. I haven’t had a HD burn out because of a power supply failure since 1995. I’ve had a few power supplies “pop.” Each time the MB was toast. The HDs survived. Bearing failures killed my HD’s... Luckily I was able to back-up the HD’s when I heard the squealing. Even if the MB POSTs there still might be some damage to the MB... Some of the MB manufacturers used to have a diagnostic program in the BIOS, but I haven’t seen those since the 2010.
Sowwy :(
Hugs,
Leila
Power supply failure
The only time I had a power supply catastrophic failure, it apparently went out with a power surge and fried the motherboard. The hard drive was undamaged. I had to replace the power supply and the motherboard, and the hard drive as well because the replacement motherboard had only SATA interfaces and the old hard drive, while completely functional, wasn't SATA. The shop which performed the repairs told me that it wasn't unusual for inexpensive power supplies to lack circuitry to prevent such surges. They were able to transfer the contents of the old hard drive to the new one, but the result was that the only things which weren't new were the case, the floppy disk drive, and the CD-ROM drive. If I hadn't wanted to keep the contents of the old hard drive (including the operating system), it might have been less expensive just to buy a new computer!
SATA
You can get USB to SATA adapters cheap. I use them to service or access drives that I have laying around.
The only time I have seen
The only time I have seen hard disk fried by the PSU was when there was a short between 5 volt and 12 volt lines. And even that ended up survivable, just the surge suppressor chip burned out. Modern disks are IMO rather resilient beasts. But I have personally seen dead sata ports on motherboard. For no apparent reason.
If you have usb/sata converter, you can try doing a problem bisection - connecting a drive to it and checking if it can be detected splits the problem between the disk and the cables/motherboard.
Surge Protector?
Why is everyone not filtering their power input through a APU with surge protection or a stand alone surge protector? I have yet to not read, hear, or personally experience any kind of smooth electrical supply from any electric company. The voltage recorders we use to put on some of the customer's homes and businesses was a real eye opener to those customers.
For those HD whether SATA or IDE or...? Pick up a docking station. They operate though a USB port and the OS in the computer it is plugged into. Thus the HD is spooled up and all programs are retrievable.
"That program is protected and non accessible."
"Do you wish to proceed?"
So I tap enter and the program opens up. Why in the world is it telling me I can't access it when it opens it up anyway?
Anyway, isn't a twenty dollar surge protector worth it to protect that thousand dollar computer? And that sixty dollar APU which smooths the power even more? Won't keep all the computer demons at bay but most of them. Those power spikes are murder on what is inside your box sitting on your desk.
always
Barb
Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl
I actually have a rather nice surge protector on my rig.
One rated for somewhere around 4500 joules, and with ethernet protection built in too should I ever go wired with that connection. Yes, the surge protector is juuuuust outside its recommended usage period -- by about a year, actually -- but even at diminished capacity it's still quite a nice unit. I don't have an APU on the thing, but despite that in the 20+ years I've been playing around with computers I've never had a situation (yet) where a power surge or power loss has cost me anything legitimately important, and an APU wouldn't have stopped this anyway.
This wasn't a surge issue. It was a laziness issue on my part for not buying a new PSU two years ago when its internal fan died and instead jury rigging a replacement onto it. A replacement that, I should add, was 20mm smaller than the original, vented into the case instead of out the bottom (since I couldn't mount the PSU facing downward with the fan grafted onto the outside,) and lacked any control from the PSU itself for speed, instead being run off a regular ol' molex connector for power.
The PSU was jank as hell, but deserves all the respect I can give it for surviving as much punishment as it did.
In response to other comments, specifically the motherboard damage one: if the mobo overall is damaged then it isn't all that severe. My motherboard is an MSI M970 and I've got an AMD FX 6350 CPU in it, with no onboard video and a UEFI BIOS. My GPU is working fine which tells me it isn't my south bridge being fried at least, and my rear USB ports all seem to work as well. As far as the things I have the capability to test at this moment the SATA ports seem to be the only thing NOT wanting to work, and I know that they tend to be a bit fiddly anyways, with this motherboard in particular. I've tried changing the SATA settings through IDE, RAID, and the various other options the BIOS will let me use, which some users have reported fixed this issue in the past, but to no avail. For 30 bucks I can get a PCI SATA 3 addon board, though, and hopefully fix this. My cousin is bringing over an external enclosure for the HDDs first, though, because I'd rather KNOW they work before buying something like that.
Thanks to everyone who's reassured me on the HDD survivability figures by the way. I've got 3 drives in the thing -- all Western Digital Caviar Blacks -- and, while I wouldn't have to replace ALL of them since they barely added up to 1.5 TB together, a new HDD is still one more expense I don't want right now.
*hugs*
Melanie E.
Surge protector
Barb - I've always used a surge protector/RF filter, but that only protects you from surges coming in from the power lines. Surges caused by a failing power supply are internal to the system and never pass through the surge suppressor. The only way to protect against that is to buy a quality power supply, but most of us use the one which came in our computer.
Advantage of building it yourself
.... is getting to choose the power supply from a quality manufacturer like Seasonic.
The Seasonic Focus line has best bang for buck and has a long warranty as well as having a very good reputation.
pre-made systems that one gets from Walmart etc may have little or no ability to upgrade if you purchase a low cost system.
Hence why I'm a "build it yourself" kinda girl :)
My rig might not be the purdiest horse in the stable but she's good enough for the moderate to heavy gaming and productivity I put her through, and was pretty cost-effective for the time I built her. Hence why I don't want to have to replace her quite yet: she's still roughly somewhere between a PS4 Pro and an Xbox One X as far as gaming power goes, and it'll be another year or two before upgrading anything in her will provide enough improvement to warrant the cost.
Melanie E.
I have a dual extrnal drive bay
I have a USB dual extrernal drive bay. I could send to you, if it is the sata ports on your MB. I bought it, when I built my new pc, to transfer stuff over from some old hard drives. Let me know if you can use it.
Thanks :)
We'll see what the situation really is when my cousin comes over this weekend. Despite my love for electronics I don't actually have a degree in them, which both him and his best friend do, so between the three of us I'm hoping to give what I've already got or can scrounge from them the best possible chance of working before spending any more money, even on shipping :P
*hugs*
Melanie E.