Okay, so I had a Dell Optiplex 990 (i7 2600, Dell D6H9T Motherboard Logic Board) with a 1TB HDD, 4TB HDD and a 240GB PNY SSD. It also had a GTX 1050ti in it and 16GB of DDR3 1333mhz RAM, but I don't think that is relevant.
It started randomly shutting down on me. So I figured the PSU was going bad, though it would give me a two to three second warning that it was about to shutdown, so maybe that wasn't the problem. It was also doing this weird thing where it would start booting up, only to shut down 2 seconds into boot, and then would restart itself a few minutes later and try again. Eventually, it would boot up after several tries.
Anyway, I decided to put a new (used) PSU in it. A 700W ThermalTake Tough Power XT. I'm pretty sure I wired it up correctly, though I am not an expert, Like all PSUs, it's pretty plug and play so I don't think I messed anything up. I guess the one thing I did was put the 4+4 pin wire into the 4pin 12V port (after separating it into two parts) but I'm pretty sure that is what you are supposed to do.
Anyway, plugged it all in, booted it up, and it couldn't find any of my hard drives. Obviously with no hard drive I couldn't get into Windows, but they weren't showing up in bios.
I tried plugging one of the HDDs into my roommate's Linux PC, on confirmed working SATA ports with confirmed working wires, and it didn't recognize them either.
After a few minutes of messing around with it, the SSD showed back up, I have no idea why or how. That had my OS and important files on it so I thought "Well that sucks that I somehow fried my two HDDs but at least I got my PC working again and still have my important files, and maybe I can figure out how to fix them later." I backed up my extra important files and then went to bed, leaving the PC on. Big mistake.
I woke up to see my computer in bootup with the now all-too-familiar "Please enter a boot device" message. The SSD was no longer being recognized.
So, I already had a newer CPU set aside for a build I was slowly working on, so I just went out and bought the remaining components and built a brand new PC with all new parts. Unfortunately, it now also required new hard drives, an expense I wasn't expecting to have.
So I got myself a new SSD and installed windows and all that Jazz and now here I am talking to you. What happened to my harddrives? Did the motherboard on my Optiplex 990 fail? Was it the extra beefy PSU overpowering it? Is there anything I can do to get them to turn back on?
I haven't even bothered with the HDDs at this point, but I did plug in the SSD and again, it isn't recognized by Windows or Bios or device manager or diskpart. But, and this is odd, it was getting extremely hot, extremely quickly. My working SSD is cool as a cucumber but the non working one that isn't even being accessed is heating up to a concerning level, to the point where I don't feel that comfortable putting it in my new PC for testing.
What could be going on here? A blown resistor inside the SSD itself maybe? Anything I can do to fix it (or them)? I'm not scared to open the bad boy up, if that will provide any information.
I don't really NEED them, but 240GB isn't really that much and I'm really missing that 4TBs of space I used to enjoy, but even another 240GB in the form of that SSD would be super helpful. Even if it is unlikely that I ever restore these hard drives, I'd still like to know what I did wrong to break them in the first place.
Thanks for any replies, and sorry for the long post.
It started randomly shutting down on me. So I figured the PSU was going bad, though it would give me a two to three second warning that it was about to shutdown, so maybe that wasn't the problem. It was also doing this weird thing where it would start booting up, only to shut down 2 seconds into boot, and then would restart itself a few minutes later and try again. Eventually, it would boot up after several tries.
Anyway, I decided to put a new (used) PSU in it. A 700W ThermalTake Tough Power XT. I'm pretty sure I wired it up correctly, though I am not an expert, Like all PSUs, it's pretty plug and play so I don't think I messed anything up. I guess the one thing I did was put the 4+4 pin wire into the 4pin 12V port (after separating it into two parts) but I'm pretty sure that is what you are supposed to do.
Anyway, plugged it all in, booted it up, and it couldn't find any of my hard drives. Obviously with no hard drive I couldn't get into Windows, but they weren't showing up in bios.
I tried plugging one of the HDDs into my roommate's Linux PC, on confirmed working SATA ports with confirmed working wires, and it didn't recognize them either.
After a few minutes of messing around with it, the SSD showed back up, I have no idea why or how. That had my OS and important files on it so I thought "Well that sucks that I somehow fried my two HDDs but at least I got my PC working again and still have my important files, and maybe I can figure out how to fix them later." I backed up my extra important files and then went to bed, leaving the PC on. Big mistake.
I woke up to see my computer in bootup with the now all-too-familiar "Please enter a boot device" message. The SSD was no longer being recognized.
So, I already had a newer CPU set aside for a build I was slowly working on, so I just went out and bought the remaining components and built a brand new PC with all new parts. Unfortunately, it now also required new hard drives, an expense I wasn't expecting to have.
So I got myself a new SSD and installed windows and all that Jazz and now here I am talking to you. What happened to my harddrives? Did the motherboard on my Optiplex 990 fail? Was it the extra beefy PSU overpowering it? Is there anything I can do to get them to turn back on?
I haven't even bothered with the HDDs at this point, but I did plug in the SSD and again, it isn't recognized by Windows or Bios or device manager or diskpart. But, and this is odd, it was getting extremely hot, extremely quickly. My working SSD is cool as a cucumber but the non working one that isn't even being accessed is heating up to a concerning level, to the point where I don't feel that comfortable putting it in my new PC for testing.
What could be going on here? A blown resistor inside the SSD itself maybe? Anything I can do to fix it (or them)? I'm not scared to open the bad boy up, if that will provide any information.
I don't really NEED them, but 240GB isn't really that much and I'm really missing that 4TBs of space I used to enjoy, but even another 240GB in the form of that SSD would be super helpful. Even if it is unlikely that I ever restore these hard drives, I'd still like to know what I did wrong to break them in the first place.
Thanks for any replies, and sorry for the long post.