On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 18:08:54 +0200, Grumble
wrote:

Hello all,

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?

Yup, replace them! Seriously, just how much does a fan cost? I
picked one up on sale a few months ago for $3.. and that was Canadian
funny-money too!

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?

Sounds like an overloaded power supply to me, though you might want to
check with your motherboard manual to be sure. This is usually caused
by a short somewhere in your system, could be just about any
component.

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.

Well, looks like you've narrowed down the issue right there. Hope
you've got good backups!

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

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

A simple nudge of the wires could have been the final straw that broke
a connection inside the drive and created a short. Or it could be
pure random chance. Tough to say.

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.

Drives can often pass those tests with no faults at all and still be
bad. The SMART tests are definitely better than nothing, but they are
certainly not a sure-thing.

I'm hoping you guys have some suggestions for me :-)

Get a new hard drive? :

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca