No power to SATA devices

[ChuckD6421]

Quick summary:
The pc POSTs but doesn't detect known good SATA hard drive or SATA CD drive. IDE Molexes are fine. Voltages in BIOS look normal.

Gory Detail:
This pc has been a very trouble-free machine I built for my Dad 2 years ago. And I've been hacking and building pc's since before there was a Tom's Hardware.

This pc experienced a power spike that took out an answering machine and an older LinkSys router, and a cheapo power strip/surge protector made the ultimate sacrifice. Maybe fortunately, the pc was powered off (but plugged in) at the time.

I've determined that the Diablotek DA Series 400W PSU is bad; it starts to spin the fans but dies after a couple seconds. I replaced that with a Turbo Cool 510 ATX PFC from a retired machine. But suspecting the Biostar N68S3B Ver. 6.2 motherboard also, I bought an identical refurbished one on eBay from a reputable seller and am now using that. Both have what I believe are the latest BIOS version from Biostar. The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 which works fine in another machine.

The Weird Part:
Neither the hard drive or the CD drive seem to be getting any power. The pc POSTs normally, one beep for a possible "Memory refresh timer error" but nothing unusual in the boot up...except that the drives don't spin up and hence are not detected in the BIOS. And this happens with the original mother board as well (making me think there's nothing wrong with it), and another known good PSU and known good SATA cables. To complicate things, an old IDE drive plugged into the Molex on the same line as the SATAs does spin up. As the kids say, 'wtf'? So what's left for common parts not swapped out are the Corsair 4GB RAM stick, the AMD CPU and the case. Is it possible this is a CPU problem? That would be surprising.

Any ideas welcome, thanks for reading.

Chuck

 

[ingtar33]

how do you know the devices are good?

if the devices aren't working on another motherboard and with a different power supply, i'd say the devices are bad. have you had them working on anything since the psu blew?

 

[ChuckD6421]

?
Answering less than a minute after I post, it doesn't sound like you read it.
"The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 which works fine in another machine."
The PSU I swapped in works fine (and is as solid piece of hardware to begin with). What other "devices" are you referring to?

 

[ingtar33]

?
Answering less than a minute after I post, it doesn't sound like you read it.
"The hard drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 which works fine in another machine."
The PSU I swapped in works fine (and is as solid piece of hardware to begin with). What other "devices" are you referring to?

the SATA cd drive

if you unplug the CD drive will the bios pick up the hard drive?

 

[ChuckD6421]

No, makes no difference without the CD drive but I did not test that on another machine yet. The hard drive also will not spin up without it's data cable. But an IDE drive on the same line will.

 

[ingtar33]

No, makes no difference without the CD drive but I did not test that on another machine yet. The hard drive also will not spin up without it's data cable. But an IDE drive on the same line will.

have you tried different sata data cables?

EDIT: never mind, i see you pointed out the sata cables have been swapped out.

well that leaves the CPU/APU or your ram. any chance you could run memtest on the ram? (you can do it without a hard drive)

 

[ingtar33]

Another idea would be to breadbox the whole machine and see if the issue goes away. might as well rule out a short being caused by the case.

 

[ChuckD6421]

I haven't tried booting off a usb flash yet, not sure I could as there doesn't appear to be a boot manager in this BIOS (or maybe there is one once a bootable device is detected). That would probably be needed to run memtest.

Sorry, what do you mean by breadbox?

 

[DougLYX]

get better surge suppressor then take the pc to the junk yard...cause after a cheapo surge suppressor goes, it loses protection and lets anything in after that, i use belkin 12 outlet unit with 3x suppression per outlet, i replace it every 2 yrs or after a surge(which ever comes first) and have an inline surge suppressor to the belkin as extra protection plus a few chokes(easy snap-on type) fitted to the cabling to the belkin for rf filtering..transients can bypass surge suppressor and still do damage.

 

[ingtar33]

I haven't tried booting off a usb flash yet, not sure I could as there doesn't appear to be a boot manager in this BIOS (or maybe there is one once a bootable device is detected). That would probably be needed to run memtest.

Sorry, what do you mean by breadbox?

breadboarding (my bad, it was late, i meant breadboarding), that would be pulling everything out of the case. resting your motherboard on something wood or cardboard. using a screwdriver to power on your system by bridging the power jumper on your motherboard, or just using a jumper to power it on.

the main reason for breadboarding is to rule out electrical shorts. You also are able to disconnect anything superfluous to basic pc operation outside of the case, and easily swap parts until you narrow down the culprit for your problem . right now i'm sorta with your original thought which is it's the CPU that's causing this... that the CPU was damaged in the power spike. But there still are a few last things you can try first. one would be breadboarding to make sure nothing electrical is happening that's messing with your system. the other is to try another stick of ram to see if the issue goes away.

 

[ChuckD6421]

Welp, it appears to be resolved. But I don't want to believe what it seems.
While I did try to be clear on the conditions and models involved, I didn't mention that the Turbo Cool PSU i wanted to swap in has a 20 pin connector and the mobo has a 24. After much digging it seemed like that shouldn't be an issue, especially if I understand the reason for the four additional pins and this being a 510 watt PSU loaded with a pretty basic setup.

I finally went back down to the pc graveyard in my basement and found another psu with a 24 pin and SATAs. Plugged it all back together and fired it up and voila, as they say in Spain; the hard drive and CD drive spin up and appear in BIOS (as well as a boot manager). Windows boots without complaint and Dad gets his email back.

So bottom line, it was the psu and I'm never believing anything I read on the internets again. Thanks for the feedback!

 

[ingtar33]

glad its solved even if i didn't actually help you figure it out.

should have mentioned the power plug 20 vs 24 issue i would have told you that it wouldn't work... but then again, it's my fault for not asking about the new psu. I am glad for the feedback. It did validate the one of the top 3 suspects in my head that there was a power issue going on.

 

[DougLYX]

So bottom line, it was the psu and I'm never believing anything I read on the internets again. Thanks for the feedback![/quotemsg]

always check multiple sources...sale pages lie, forums mostly don't lie unless they get exposed for being a butt-kisser

btw, this mobo for xp x32 pc i''m talking to u from has 24pin socket and 20 pin pwr going into it...go figure.

 

[DougLYX]

oh and breadboarding isn't old-school...building a pc with soldering iron and using vacuum tubes in your pwr supply is old-school
they only found out recently that vacuum tubes are most effective dc pwr convertor when compared to chips or other configs, cause they still use them in the most expensive stereo gear for the same reason...clean dc pwr output.

i'm really old school..used to hit junkyards and flea markets for parts and my basement smelt like flux from all my soldering. my first home built was ibm/apple cross breed.

 

[ingtar33]

oh and breadboarding isn't old-school...building a pc with soldering iron and using vacuum tubes in your pwr supply is old-school
they only found out recently that vacuum tubes are most effective dc pwr convertor when compared to chips or other configs, cause they still use them in the most expensive stereo gear for the same reason...clean dc pwr output.

i'm really old school..used to hit junkyards and flea markets for parts and my basement smelt like flux from all my soldering. my first home built was ibm/apple cross breed.

haha

Yeah. i remember the days where overclocking was strictly something you could do with jumpers and a soldering gun. This bios stuff makes it too easy for these kids these days