In article , "ME"
wrote:

"Paul" wrote in message
...
snip
That's the power supply and that's the image of the one I've got.
http://us-depot.com/frshag520wad1.html
Yes, I am assuming that's what the clicking was right before it shut off.
Sadly it didnt do so fast enought to save everything.

then something else must have happened to the thing. (Over voltage
protection is supposed to be a separate circuit in the PSU, that
shuts the PSU off in the event that any voltage rises higher than a
certain percentage above the nominal value. Overcurrent protection,
on the other hand, is pretty useless, as the current that would trip
at would be so high, that whatever was connected at the other
end would already be on fire :-)
As in the CD-rom drive lights flashing right as it turned off. I've gone
thru Microscope and the board, CPU , memory all test fine. The Asus crash
free bios saved the day on the board as it wouldnt boot till I used the cd.
As it looks now the 40GB HDD & 6X DVD cd-rom (decoder card?) on the
secondary controller (there were also on the same power supply line also)
are bad and one hdd has some unrecoverable crc error's on it. Do you know
anything about Memtest86? Does it activate or use the ide controller? I dont
know if reformating will resolve the crc failures and I'm looking at trying
to backup my files before trying. I'm hoping this hasnt hurt the new 160GB
SATA drive.

The floppy version of Memtest86 has no reason to go near the IDE
controller. If you used the ISO CDROM image, then the BIOS has routines
in it (INT13 routines?), to bootstrap code off an IDE device.
Maybe Memtest86 uses INT13 and the BIOS in both cases.

You are assuming here, that the damage was caused by accesses to
the IDE interface. I don't see any reason to suspect that. Since you
mention a burnt smell, this could be purely a power supply problem
that killed a bunch of stuff. The logic on the drives is done with
+5V, and maybe that is the voltage that went out of spec. (+12V
could probably take a bit more abuse, as the motor and actuator
would get power from there.)

snip

to
rebuild the machine, it could be that one of the original items you
own, is a "time bomb", waiting to kill the next piece of good
hardware it is connected to.
This is my worry. As soon as I get a chance I'm writing NWCA a letter about
it. As they havent even advised me they shipped the replacment power supply
and it's been three day's I'm preparing for it.

As you've been doing a lot of testing on the components, it sounds
like that hasn't happened so far. Only the DVD drive sounds a
bit scary.


Maybe the power supply wasn't the
part at fault, and it got hot because of an overload coming from
something plugged into it.
Well, I did have a lot connected but that's why I got a 520Watt. Before it
died it had 4 Hdd's/2 cd-roms/video It ran in that configuration almost 24/7
for over 38 day's before it quit. It quit while running Memtest86 so it
wasnt really doing all the stuff it does when running Windows. I just
started having problems with it the saterday it died. The night before I
watched Xmen 2 on it.

I've measured the power comsumption on my computer while running
memtest86, and it isn't the hottest test you can run. In terms of
total power, on my puny Radeon 8500 equipped system, I find 3DMark
draws about the same current from the wall as Memtest86.

On a P4 system, the processor uses +12V for the motherboard Vcore
switching supply, so any processor intensive activity can draw up to
8 amps or so from +12V. The DIMMs generally draw a smaller amount
of power, at about 5W for an active DIMM. On a single channel, only
one DIMM can be kept active at a time, so the total power of all
DIMMs is less than N*5W. The DIMM circuit could be a small switcher
as well, and run off +5V. That isn't enough current to worry about.

Maybe the Powmax isn't good for as much +12V as it claims ?
Tomshardware.com has had the odd article on PSUs and whether
they live up to their specs or not.



At least keep your eyes "peeled" for some unlikely possibilities.
This is why I keep doing all the "testing" instead of playing, hoping I can
catch it before hand. I'd hate to get this all said and done and then have
more trouble.

Does the original power supply still run, and have you been using
it for your testing ?
No, the power supply, no matter what it's connected to will start them in
1-2 seconds it shut's off. No, I got out my last system parts (CUSL2-C,PIII
1Ghz, 512 Ram) and used it to do most of the testing. Last night my Dad got
me an Allied 300 Watt for testing the board, video card and SATA drive.
What's the best program for testing a SATA controller and drive? That's what
I'm on now to write this. It's working but the CPU temp is 116F, volatges
are all within 10% and no alarms but if I connect the DVD player and turn it
on the machine reboot's right after the desktop comes up. On boot smart
drive say's the 40 gb is about to fail and the video has artifact's in it
and periodicaly it goes wiggly, kind of like trying to run a Super VGA video
card on a Non-Super VGA Monitor.

Hmm. Doesn't look good for the DVD player. In the BIOS, do the
brand name and model number of the drive show up in the IDE section
of the BIOS ? To get that info, the BIOS has to be able to draw
a few bytes of data across the cable, and that will help determine
whether it is completely dead.

No idea on the wiggly video. It really should either work or just
be dead.

For a disk drive, I would try to find a program that checks the disk
surface for CRC errors. A "scandisk" or "chkdisk" type program probably
does more than that, and all you really want is something that just
reads every sector.

Disk drives contain spare sectors per track, and for a simple failed
sector, the bad one will be "spared out" by the controller. That is why
most of the time, you cannot observe problems happening to your disk.
(The level of sparing or problems can sometimes be observed by running
something like HDTach or another disk benchmarking program. If the
"bandwidth" versus "position of the head on the disk" plot is not
smooth, the valleys in the plot could be indicating a large amount of
sparing activity, which would slow the disk down. This really depends
on whether the spare sectors are on the same track or somewhere else in
the same cylinder. I don't know what sparing policy is used on today's
dense disks.)

If CRC errors show up now, it means a previously recorded sector is
damaged. A worst case scenario, would be the head writing over the
embedded servo information, but chances are that would give some other
kind of error. If the CRC errors are all over the disk, then maybe
the disk heads or head amplifiers got damaged by an out of spec +5V.

If you have valuable data on the disk, the first thing to do is
try to make a bit by bit copy of the disk, to another disk. Then,
you can do whatever kind of testing you want to the questionable
disk. For example, some disk manufacturers have a test program that
they insist users run, before returning a disk under warranty. Those
programs generally don't test the entire surface of the disk, but
may pop up a fancy error code, indicating a hardware failure of
some sort. If you are certain all valuable data on the disk is
backed up, you could try reformatting it, and then see what shape
it is in. If the electronics are damaged, the disk will probably
hang with the drive LED lit, while attempting the format.

Based on my comments, I think you can see that I don't expect your
drive to be good for anything but a paper weight. Something I've
done with the last two disks I bought, was make multiple copies
of the same ~1GB file to the new disk. I fill it right up with
big files. Then, I use a file checksumming program, to read and
generate a checksum for each file. All the files should be identical
to the original file stored on another drive. That is an application
level test that the disk is working. If you can pass that test a
few times, then maybe the disk is a "keeper".


Or have you already tried replacing it ?
See above

It is times like this that a voltmeter, and a clamp-on DC ammeter
come in handy.
Yes, I have a nice Fluke, that's how I first found there was indead no -12V.
Just to back up the DMAN card's testing. Kenn at NWCA has admitted it
sound's like the power supply died and sais Monday they will send out a
replacement. He was to talk to someone and find out if they needed this one
returned and so far no answer on that.

Many people claim that modern motherboards don't use -5V and -12V.
Some of the RS232 level shifting chips, used for COM ports, now
generate the necessary voltages internally, so they no longer need
-12V. While there could be some crazy function running off the -12V,
I doubt it. I think your PSU had more than that wrong with it when
it died.



Maybe you could take that Powmax to a local computer shop, one
that has some kind of power supply tester, and see whether it
is still working or not ?
I live in a small town, one computer shop and he has no tester other than
the meter as I have done. I'm consideirng getting one of those plug in type
on ebay.

If the PSU smoked or flamed out, then
you don't need to waste your time on it.

I'm unable to smell due to my trach but my Mom smelled it and said it
smelled burned, that was two day's after it died.

Paul
ME

A well designed PSU should have thermal protection, and when the
main heatsink on the PSU gets too hot, the PSU should shut down
without burning any of its components. Same goes for the multi
winding transformer. If something burned, then that could be
a failure condition the PSU doesn't check for.

I'm sorry I cannot be of more help with regard to test programs.
I haven't had enough experience building PCs to have collected
programs like that. I've used some of the nice tests that
come with Sun computers, and I've even written test code for
the computers my former employer used to build. Since I've been
pretty lucky with my home PCs, I haven't had need of anything
more than memtest86, prime95, cpuburn, and 3dmark2001se.
Just filling a disk up with files has so far been a "good enough"
test for me.

Paul