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Old October 25th 04, 06:24 PM
Grumble
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Grumble wrote:

I've been pulling my hair for 3 hours over this problem, so I thought
I'd ask in here, and see if people have had a similar problem.

I have an oldish (bought 08/2001) Socket A motherboard (ASUS
A7V133-C). The chipset fan was starting to whine after collecting dust
for 6 months (since I last cleaned it up). As I've done several times,
I unscrewed the chipset fan, partly lifted the sticker in the middle,
put a drop of vaseline oil on the fan's axis, and used a vacuum
cleaner to make the fan spin for a while. I did the same to the CPU fan.

Is that stupid? Is there a better way to treat fans when they get
dirty and start whining?

Now, when I try to boot the system, all the fans start to spin for a
few seconds (it varies from 1 to 4), then everything shuts down (I
hear strange sounds in the PSU), and the POWER LED on the front panel
blinks steadily (about 1 second on, then 1 second off) as if the PC
was in some sort of deep sleep mode.

Any idea what this means?

After several hours testing different combinations, I noticed that I
could boot if I unplugged my hard disk drive (uh oh!). My HDD is an
IBM Deskstar 34GXP DPTA-372050.

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/desk/ds34gxp.htm

I don't understand how cleaning the fans could have damaged the HDD.

NOTE: A few weeks ago, I thought the drive was experiencing the "click
of death" (I thought it was a 75GXP, don't know if 34GXP were
affected). I downloaded the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic tool from Hitachi,
and ran it for several hours. It found no problem with the drive.



Another experiment: the PC boots if I plug the HDD's power connector,
but leave the data connector unplugged. Would this rule out a problem
with the HDD? Or can the disk send weird signals on the data path which
cause the PC to refuse to boot?

Could the power supply be giving out? Does HDD initialization draw a lot
of current? (I might not make any sense, I'm just writing whatever comes
through my mind.)


I tried something crazy: I booted with the HDD's power connector plugged
in, and the HDD's data connector unplugged. I stopped the boot process
by going into the BIOS. Then, with the computer on, I plugged the HDD's
data connector. I checked that the BIOS could detect the HDD and picked
"exit discarding changes".

The PC booted into Windows.

I'm hoping this is a problem with the PSU, not with the HDD (I'd say
that last experiment would point to a failing PSU, no?)

What are the dangers of plugging the data connector with the power
turned on?