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Post power surge problems
Hello all,
As some of you may know there was a lightning storm in England recently. The power went out for a second and my PC which was connected to a Cyberpower BR-650E surge protector and UPS lost power. Somehow the surge protector and UPS was not able to protect the PC. I rebooted and the BIOS said the motherboard detected a power surge. On entering Windows everything seemed to be fine so I went to bed. The following morning I could not enter Windows 7 (blue screen) or SuSE Linux 11.3 (something about a recursive error). When I tried using a Windows 7 installation DVD, it blue screens on "Loading Windows". Clearly some hardware has been damaged by the power surge. Should I buy a replacement PSU, motherboard, CPU, graphics card or RAM? I use the computer as my main PC in a SOHO and really need it up and running ASAP. Thanks. JB |
#2
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Post power surge problems
J B wrote:
Hello all, As some of you may know there was a lightning storm in England recently. The power went out for a second and my PC which was connected to a Cyberpower BR-650E surge protector and UPS lost power. Somehow the surge protector and UPS was not able to protect the PC. I rebooted and the BIOS said the motherboard detected a power surge. On entering Windows everything seemed to be fine so I went to bed. The following morning I could not enter Windows 7 (blue screen) or SuSE Linux 11.3 (something about a recursive error). When I tried using a Windows 7 installation DVD, it blue screens on "Loading Windows". Clearly some hardware has been damaged by the power surge. Should I buy a replacement PSU, motherboard, CPU, graphics card or RAM? I use the computer as my main PC in a SOHO and really need it up and running ASAP. Thanks. JB The good news (if there is any), is that a lot of stuff is working on your computer. If you're seeing a BIOS screen, and not badly scrambled, lots of stuff had to work for that to show up. For the sake of completeness, I'd run memtest86+. You can get that from www.memtest.org , half way down the page. Disconnect all storage devices, except whatever storage device will be used to boot memtest86+. This is to prevent broken storage devices from upsetting the BIOS. If you have one stick of RAM, the bottom 640K can't be tested. If you have two sticks of RAM, pull them, then reinsert them in "single channel mode". One stick will be the "high memory" stick, and fully tested. The second stick will be the "low memory" stick, and it's bottom 640K won't be tested. Run one pass of memtest86+ error free, before continuing. Then, swap the sticks in their two slots. This makes the low address stick the high one. And then it will be completely tested. If you owned four sticks, repeat the procedure using only the two remaining sticks. ******* If that passes, my real suspicion, is something happened to the disks. Do you have backups ? Was the backup drive disconnected during the lightning storm ? Backups should be disconnected when not in use. This reduces the chance they'll be burned by lightning. If you have access to a second computer, connect the drive(s) from the damaged computer, one at a time. You could also bring over the optical drive, and test it. Your first test, would be a read-verify, to prove the sectors are all accessible. While a natural reaction would be to reach for CHKDSK to do this, the thing I don't like about CHKDSK, is it is a "repair-in-place" tools. If you had an IDE cable on the drive, and the cable was bad, CHKDSK has been known to trash a disk, because each write attempt fails due to the bad cable. CHKDSK works best, if the disk is actually healthy, and all that was needed, was rewriting some structures. If you don't have backups, you can even consider backing up the damaged drives. And in the process, the backup tool may complain about bad sectors. The backup procedure (sector by sector) then functions as the "read-verify test". So my first purchase, might be some replacement drives, which will function quite nicely in the first ten minutes of your experiments, as your backup destination when you copy the questionable disks. With backups in hand (sector-by-sector in case the file system(s) are damaged), now it's "safe" to use CHKDSK. If CHKDSK makes noodle soup out of the drive, you have your backup to restore with. And if the backup attempt failed, you also get evidence of a hard drive failure. (Then the disks purchased, become your new blank disks for OS reinstallation.) For home repair work, a second computer is very convenient. It's pretty hard to (cheaply) repair a single PC, while commuting to the public library to use their machine to Google stuff :-) And in this case, a second machine, with disk interfaces suitable for testing your storage devices, would be an excellent tool to have access to. ******* In terms of resilience to power surges: 1) A cheap ATX supply ($20) can have virtually no protection features. A transient could come right though it. The surge protection on a UPS, may still let dangerous transients through. 2) The motherboard has switching converters on it. These provide a measure of buffering on transients. The processor has the Vcore switcher (and that protects the processor). System RAM has its own little one or two phase supply (providing a measure of protection). This is a potential reason the CPU and RAM will survive, even if the motherboard is blown. (And we don't have any symptoms yet, which positively verify a bad motherboard.) 3) Hard drives, have something like an MOV across +5V and +12V to ground. They're on the disk controller board, near the power connector. This suppresses transients. A continuous power surge (for many seconds) will cause the protection devices to burn. The MOV like device is not intended to protect against a continuous surge. Only a pulse of too much voltage gets stopped. The +12V one, may clamp at around 15V or so. The disk cabling is susceptible to induced currents. So the interface on a drive could be ruined. I haven't read of enough surge cases, to rate all of these possibilities. The CPU and RAM do seem to hold up very well. The reason I'm having you test the RAM above, is because RAM naturally goes bad on its own, and if you haven't tested it within the last year or so, it's time to test it now and find out if it is still good. I don't think the transient event got it. But it could still be bad. Then the next step, is testing disks and optical drive, one at a time, on another computer. Making backups etc. If you get any more new interesting symptoms, post back. Paul |
#3
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Post power surge problems
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your very helpful reply! The fried PC has 3 hard drives, 2 of which are encrypted with Bitlocker. I pulled out the main drive (unencrypted) and tested it with a IDE/SATA - USB adapter and it seemed to be fine. I didn't test the encrypted drives because it would have been irrelevant to the Windows 7 login or re-installation blue screens. I've ordered a new Socket AM3+ motherboard. Will run Memtest overnight. In my experience Memtest hasn't shown up problems before. A previous PC had an undocumented incompatibility between munchkin RAM and the motherboard and kept blue screening. Memtest kept on testing perfectly. Changing the RAM fixed the BSODs. Just when I am busiest with work the PC gets trashed by lightning! Paul wrote: J B wrote: Hello all, As some of you may know there was a lightning storm in England recently. The power went out for a second and my PC which was connected to a Cyberpower BR-650E surge protector and UPS lost power. Somehow the surge protector and UPS was not able to protect the PC. I rebooted and the BIOS said the motherboard detected a power surge. On entering Windows everything seemed to be fine so I went to bed. The following morning I could not enter Windows 7 (blue screen) or SuSE Linux 11.3 (something about a recursive error). When I tried using a Windows 7 installation DVD, it blue screens on "Loading Windows". Clearly some hardware has been damaged by the power surge. Should I buy a replacement PSU, motherboard, CPU, graphics card or RAM? I use the computer as my main PC in a SOHO and really need it up and running ASAP. Thanks. JB The good news (if there is any), is that a lot of stuff is working on your computer. If you're seeing a BIOS screen, and not badly scrambled, lots of stuff had to work for that to show up. For the sake of completeness, I'd run memtest86+. You can get that from www.memtest.org , half way down the page. Disconnect all storage devices, except whatever storage device will be used to boot memtest86+. This is to prevent broken storage devices from upsetting the BIOS. If you have one stick of RAM, the bottom 640K can't be tested. If you have two sticks of RAM, pull them, then reinsert them in "single channel mode". One stick will be the "high memory" stick, and fully tested. The second stick will be the "low memory" stick, and it's bottom 640K won't be tested. Run one pass of memtest86+ error free, before continuing. Then, swap the sticks in their two slots. This makes the low address stick the high one. And then it will be completely tested. If you owned four sticks, repeat the procedure using only the two remaining sticks. ******* If that passes, my real suspicion, is something happened to the disks. Do you have backups ? Was the backup drive disconnected during the lightning storm ? Backups should be disconnected when not in use. This reduces the chance they'll be burned by lightning. If you have access to a second computer, connect the drive(s) from the damaged computer, one at a time. You could also bring over the optical drive, and test it. Your first test, would be a read-verify, to prove the sectors are all accessible. While a natural reaction would be to reach for CHKDSK to do this, the thing I don't like about CHKDSK, is it is a "repair-in-place" tools. If you had an IDE cable on the drive, and the cable was bad, CHKDSK has been known to trash a disk, because each write attempt fails due to the bad cable. CHKDSK works best, if the disk is actually healthy, and all that was needed, was rewriting some structures. If you don't have backups, you can even consider backing up the damaged drives. And in the process, the backup tool may complain about bad sectors. The backup procedure (sector by sector) then functions as the "read-verify test". So my first purchase, might be some replacement drives, which will function quite nicely in the first ten minutes of your experiments, as your backup destination when you copy the questionable disks. With backups in hand (sector-by-sector in case the file system(s) are damaged), now it's "safe" to use CHKDSK. If CHKDSK makes noodle soup out of the drive, you have your backup to restore with. And if the backup attempt failed, you also get evidence of a hard drive failure. (Then the disks purchased, become your new blank disks for OS reinstallation.) For home repair work, a second computer is very convenient. It's pretty hard to (cheaply) repair a single PC, while commuting to the public library to use their machine to Google stuff :-) And in this case, a second machine, with disk interfaces suitable for testing your storage devices, would be an excellent tool to have access to. ******* In terms of resilience to power surges: 1) A cheap ATX supply ($20) can have virtually no protection features. A transient could come right though it. The surge protection on a UPS, may still let dangerous transients through. 2) The motherboard has switching converters on it. These provide a measure of buffering on transients. The processor has the Vcore switcher (and that protects the processor). System RAM has its own little one or two phase supply (providing a measure of protection). This is a potential reason the CPU and RAM will survive, even if the motherboard is blown. (And we don't have any symptoms yet, which positively verify a bad motherboard.) 3) Hard drives, have something like an MOV across +5V and +12V to ground. They're on the disk controller board, near the power connector. This suppresses transients. A continuous power surge (for many seconds) will cause the protection devices to burn. The MOV like device is not intended to protect against a continuous surge. Only a pulse of too much voltage gets stopped. The +12V one, may clamp at around 15V or so. The disk cabling is susceptible to induced currents. So the interface on a drive could be ruined. I haven't read of enough surge cases, to rate all of these possibilities. The CPU and RAM do seem to hold up very well. The reason I'm having you test the RAM above, is because RAM naturally goes bad on its own, and if you haven't tested it within the last year or so, it's time to test it now and find out if it is still good. I don't think the transient event got it. But it could still be bad. Then the next step, is testing disks and optical drive, one at a time, on another computer. Making backups etc. If you get any more new interesting symptoms, post back. Paul |
#4
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Post power surge problems
J B;1344551 Wrote: As some of you may know there was a lightning storm in England recently. The power went out for a second and my PC which was connected to a Cyberpower BR-650E surge protector and UPS lost power. Somehow the surge protector and UPS was not able to protect the PC. You might want to read the manufacturer spec numbers for both UPS and protector. Neither claim to protect from a typically destructive surge. Both have near zero numbers. How does its hundreds of joules absorb a surge that is hundreds of thousands of joules? Best is to ignore every salesman that does not define every answer with relevant numbers. You did not earth a 'whole house' protector? Then your only protections is superior protection already found inside every electronic appliance. The protector may have made surge damage easier. More on that later. Moving on to recovery. If BIOS executes, then we can move on to a specific defective part. Nothing inside a computer detects a surge. The word ‘surge’ refers to a USB port that is shorted or consuming too much current. A fundamental function found in the very first USB 1.0. More on that later. If the computer is from one of the more responsible computer manufacturers, then it has comprehensive hardware diagnostics provide free on the hard drive, on a provided CD, and from the web. Then you are told exactly what is defective. No doubt. No 'try this or do that' nonsense. No problem. Answer is immediate. All computer manufacturers have such diagnostics. Only the better manufacturers provide them. Otherwise you must now do lots of reading and rereading. What does or halts when loading any of those OSes. Generally a verbose option will report each important driver as its loads. One that hangs will identify a hardware defect. Or obtain diagnostics from each component vendor. For example, load the disk drive manufacturers diagnostic to learn much more than anyone here can suggest. This diagnostic is on a drive manufacturer’s web site or obtained from bootdisk.com. But again, best solutions always mean diagnostics or other tools that provide numbers. Same applies to other parts. For example, no memory is used until the BIOS loads. And then tests each memory. What exactly is each memory error code? Or did BIOS find memory OK and move on? Or get a third party memory tester - ie Memtst86. Of course, all this assumed voltages are OK. Normal is for voltages to have been defective even months ago. And only just now you are failures due to that defective voltage. However, you could have seen this one coming months ago with a £7 tool from Maplin and one full minute of labor. Or see it now by asking for directions, posting those numbers, then having someone who knows this stuff interpret those numbers. If surge damage, then a destructive current entered on one path. And left on some other path. Simultaneously. For example, an adjacent protector can earth a surge into the motherboard while bypassing superior protection inside a supply. Then the same current is outgoing via a USB port. Just a typical example. Also why surges do not damage memory, CPU, disk or other devices. Each has an incoming surge path. But have no outgoing path. No outgoing path means no electric current through and therefore no surge damage. So, report every number. Report the exact wording of each problem message. Only then can better help reply with a useful answer. Provided above are sources of error messages and always critically important numbers. Only then can the better informed post a useful solution. |
#5
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Post power surge problems
On Jun 18, 8:39*am, J B wrote:
The fried PC has 3 hard drives, 2 of which are encrypted with Bitlocker. I pulled out the main drive (unencrypted) and tested it with a IDE/SATA - USB adapter and it seemed to be fine. I didn't test the encrypted drives because it would have been irrelevant to the Windows 7 login or re-installation blue screens. Do you mena the fried drives aren't even recognized when the computer powers on, in the BIOS screen? If so, the drives or the motherboard's controller really is fried. Otherwise you may want to see what the drive makers' self-booting SMART diagnostic says because a lot of times a power surge just causes cached data to be lost. Will run Memtest overnight. In my experience Memtest hasn't shown up problems before. A previous PC had an undocumented incompatibility between munchkin RAM and the motherboard and kept blue screening. Memtest kept on testing perfectly. Changing the RAM fixed the BSODs. Don't use Memtest because it's a fairly lousy diagnostic. MemTest86, MemTest86+, and Gold Memory are better, and I'd prefer to run Gold and one of the other two tests because the combination almost always finds errors in overnight testing. But test for a long time because I've had errors not appear for 4-5 hours, and one person saw nothing with MemTest86+, while Gold revealed an error in about an hour but neede another 9 hours to show it again. |
#6
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Post power surge problems
On 6/18/2012 6:40 PM, westom wrote:
You might want to read the manufacturer spec numbers for both UPS and protector. Neither claim to protect from a typically destructive surge. Nonsense. Some protectors even have protected equipment warranties. Excellent information on surges and surge protection is at: http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_lhm/IEEE_Guide.pdf - "How to protect your house and its contents from lightning: IEEE guide for surge protection of equipment connected to AC power and communication circuits" published by the IEEE in 2005 (the IEEE is a major organization of electrical and electronic engineers). And also: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/p.../surgesfnl.pdf - "NIST recommended practice guide: Surges Happen!: how to protect the appliances in your home" published by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2001 The IEEE surge guide is more technical. Both are based on US wiring practice, but the principles are the same everywhere. Both have near zero numbers. How does its hundreds of joules absorb a surge that is hundreds of thousands of joules? The author of the NIST surge guide investigated how much energy might be absorbed in a MOV in a plug-in protector. Branch circuits were 10M and longer, and the surge on incoming power wires was up to 10,000A . (That is the maximum that has any reasonable probability of occurring and is based on a 100,000A strike to a utility pole adjacent to the house in typical urban overhead distribution.) The maximum energy at the MOV was a surprisingly small 35 joules. In 13 of 15 cases it was 1 joule or less. You did not earth a 'whole house' protector? Service panel suppressors are a real good idea. But from the NIST surge guide: "Q - Will a surge protector installed at the service entrance be sufficient for the whole house? A - There are two answers to than question: Yes for one-link appliances [electronic equipment], No for two-link appliances [equipment connected to power AND phone or cable or....]. Since most homes today have some kind of two-link appliances, the prudent answer to the question would be NO - but that does not mean that a surge protector installed at the service entrance is useless." Service panel protectors do not by themselves prevent high voltages from developing between power and phone/cable/... wires. The NIST surge guide suggests most equipment damage is from high voltage between power and signal wires. In England a phone entry protector often does not limit the voltage on the wires to the earthing system as is common in the US. That is a particular hole in surge protection for anything connected to power and phone. Then your only protections is superior protection already found inside every electronic appliance. Some equipment has some protection. Some has none. Not likely any has as good protection as a plug-in protector. If surge damage, then a destructive current entered on one path. And left on some other path. Simultaneously. For example, an adjacent protector can earth a surge into the motherboard while bypassing superior protection inside a supply. Not for a properly wired protector. When using a plug-in protector all interconnected equipment needs to be connected to the same protector. External connections, like phone, also must go through the protector. Connecting all wiring through the protector prevents damaging voltages between power and signal wires. Would seem unlikely a surge got past 2 devices. Plug-in protectors are likely to have higher ratings than UPSs. Often power surges short the line side diodes in a computer power supply, and sometimes blow the fuse. Often the computers work when those components have been replaced. On first reboot "BIOS said the motherboard detected a power surge" seems like an odd message. I don't know how BIOS would know. Lot of good advice in the thread. Will be interesting if a new motherboard fixes the failure. |
#7
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Post power surge problems
bud--;1344878 Wrote: Some protectors even have protected equipment warranties. bud is paid to promote plug-in protectors. It is his job to promote subjective myths. My personal troll is posting here only because I posted here. He does not even help the OP solve a failed computer. It is his job to protect sales of a protector that did not even protect the OP’s computer. He is only posting here because I posted damming facts based in over 100 years of well proven science and experience. Even the protector’s warranty is full of fine print exemptions so that many never got reimbursed. Newsman in a discussion entitled "SONY TiVo SVR-2000 said Eventually it boiled down to a line in the warranty that said "Belkin at it's sole discretion can reject any claim for any reason.” The topic is about fixing the OP's computer. A computer maybe damaged because it was connected to a plug-in protector. A protector that did the near zero protection found in all such protectors. bud is paid to be my personal troll. He offers nothing helpful to the OP. Even lies about the warranty. Always forgetting to mention important facts such as fine print exemptions. It is his job to promote plug-in protectors and the associated myths. Not to help the OP. Provided were tasks the OP might perform to identify a failure before fixing anything. His protector may have simply earthed a surge destructively via the computer. As the IEEE citations shows on page 42 figure 8. A plug-in protector found a best path to earth 8000 volts destructively via TV2. OP may have damage for the same reasons. No properly earthed 'whole house' protector. And a power strip without earthing, is too close to appliances, and can make appliance damage easier. As the OP has now learned the hard way. Find the resulting computer damage by tracing a destructive surge path to earth. Often a surge will cross a motherboard without doing damage. And damage the outgoing surge path - ie a peripheral port. If not earthed before entering a building, then a surge will hunt for earth destructively via appliances. The OP’s plug-in protector did the near zero protection that was expected. |
#8
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Post power surge problems
On 6/21/2012 9:39 AM, westom wrote:
bud--;1344878 Wrote: Some protectors even have protected equipment warranties. bud is paid to promote plug-in protectors. It is his job to promote subjective myths. My only association with the surge protection industry is I am using some surge protectors. If westom had valid technical arguments he wouldn't have to lie. My "subjective myths" come from the IEEE and NIST surge guides. The correct link for the NIST surge guide, by the way, is: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/p.../surgesfnl.pdf He is only posting here because I posted damming facts based in over 100 years of well proven science and experience. Westom googles for "surge" and is here because the OP said the magic word. Westom is on a crusade to save the universe from the scourge of plug-in protectors and compulsively posts his drivel all over the internet. "Well proven science and experience" are in the IEEE and NIST surge guides. Both say plug-in protectors are effective. Even the protector’s warranty is full of fine print exemptions so that many never got reimbursed. Newsman in a discussion entitled "SONY TiVo SVR-2000 said Eventually it boiled down to a line in the warranty that said "Belkin at it's sole discretion can reject any claim for any reason.” Westom ignores that newsman also said "they gave me a ton of crap, including that it was null and void b/c the Tivo was also connected to the coax line for cable" As both surge guides and my first post say, "external connections, like phone [and cable], also must go through the protector". That is essential in order to limit the voltage between all the wires. It is inconceivable that Belkin did not say the same thing in instructions for use. The claim was denied because of Newsman's incompetence. Westom does not understand because of his incompetence. The topic is about fixing the OP's computer. Then why did westom compulsively post his drivel about plug-in protectors? As the IEEE citations shows on page 42 figure 8. A plug-in protector found a best path to earth 8000 volts destructively via TV2. Anyone with minimal mental abilities can discover what the IEEE guide says in this example: - A plug-in protector protects the TV connected to it. - "To protect TV2, a second multiport protector located at TV2 is required." - The illustration "shows a very common improper use of multiport protectors" - In the example a surge comes in on a cable service with the ground wire from cable entry ground block to the earthing system at the power service that is far too long. In that case the IEEE guide says "the only effective way of protecting the equipment is to use a multiport [plug-in] protector." - westom's favored power service protector would provide absolutely NO protection. It is simply a lie that the plug-in protector in the IEEE example damages the second TV. For real science read the IEEE and NIST surge guides. Excellent and reliable information on surge protection. And both guides say plug-in protectors are effective. |
#9
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Post power surge problems
On 6/23/2012 8:51 AM, bud-- wrote:
The correct link for the NIST surge guide, by the way, is: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/p.../surgesfnl.pdf Looks like they moved it. This one works: http://www.eeel.nist.gov/817/pubs/spd-anthology/file/Surges%20happen!.pdf |
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