rp wrote:

On Fri, 11 May 2018 06:53:14 -0000 (UTC), Yes wrote:

I followed your advice. I have four SATA devices - a CD/DVD player
and three HDDs. I disconnected all of them. The pc booted up.
After that, I re-connected each one individually. When all was
said and done, one HD would always result in immediate shutdown.
With another HD, the pc would boot up, but BIOS would not recognize
that the HD was there. My pc would only recognize the CD/DVD
player and one HD. Fortunately (???), that was my c: drive. I'll
have to research if the data on the broken HDDs can be salvaged.

I believe the SATA connectors on the mobo work. I plugged the SATA
cable of the working HD into the various SATA connectors and
confirmed that BIOS recognized it.

I'm glad it helped. More often than not it's a drive problem but
that's just in my experience and someone else may have seen more
motherboard problems :-)

It does sound as if you have two faulty drives. Maybe switching the
power off and on too quickly caused a spike that killed them. It
shouldn't happen with any power supply but maybe a budget one couldn't
cope with the frequent off and ons. If it's a quality supply that's
done it I'd replace it as I would take that as a sign of future
trouble looming.

I'll have to start reconstructing my data from the time of my last
backup. But now that I can comfortably use my pc, I've been able to
start hunting down my notes about my hardware. Using a laptop just
doesn't cut it when I've been accustomed to using a desktop with
full-fledged keyboard.

AFAICT - and I'm gun shy about digging into the physical eqpt atm to
verify given how I mucked things up previously - the power supply is
Antec's BP550 PLUS dating back to 2010.

Who are considered the quality PSU manufacturers these days? I've
started watching some of those advice/review videos on YouTube
power supplies and terminology. EVGA gets plugged quite a bit as being
high quality. Corsair was also cited as being a quality PSU brand.

I expect I'll replace my existing PSU with another one somewhere around
550W to 600W. The PSU is located on the bottom in my case. I'm
tempted to give more weight to a fully modular PSU, but don't have very
strong opinions one way or another; being able to cut back on the
number of wires inside the case is a bit appealing but doesn't strike
me as a priority consideration when replacing the PSU I have.

John