When all else fails...

[o1d_dude]

...rational thinking hopefully kicks in.

Nothing worse than the trying to start up your main household PC desktop and getting nothing, right. Yup, the PC that has all your wife's email accounts, your iTunes library, family pictures, tax returns and information on it. I think I have all that stuff backed up, right? Oh, wait...the external drive I bought for backup purposes is starting to go south on me according to the S.M.A.R.T info.

Fortunately my PC has something called a D-bracket on the back and feeds out red and green LED patterns that can be used to diagnose boot failures. After watching it attempt to boot and failing in any number of different processes, I broke out my power supply tester. Yup. Power supply has gone south as well.

Minor parenthetical thought here: Over the years, I've had THREE Antec power supply units fail. Note to self. Do not buy another Antec power supply. While I'm at it, I've a number of Western Digital hard drives fail as well...including the one that was supposed to be my backup storage vault. Do not buy any more Western Digital drives.

Busted out the netbook and hooked it up to the giant Samsung PC monitor and the wired network for speed purposes and the Dude family was back on the air. Sort of. Mrs. OD couldn't access her email accounts as she uses Outlook Express on the dead box. Probably shouldn't have mentioned to her that I've told her repeatedly that box mail can't hold a candle to web mail accounts. Somewhat of a mistake I think.

Went up to Fry's this morning and browsed the offerings. In that my PC is somewhat of an antique (maybe 6-8 years old but at least it's an Athlon 64), I needed a power supply with the four pin molex connectors for my hard drives and optical drives. Yes, they're IDE connectors but I said it was an antique. The mobo does have four SATA ports, tho. Maybe I should look into upgrading one of these years.

After installing the power supply twice and getting the wiring all neat and orderly for improved case air flow, I booted. It stalled with three greens and one red LED. Could either be failure to find the hard drive or ISA. Tore into the hard drive connections and did a bit more wiring wizardry but no dice. Stalled in the same process. Wash, rinse, repeat for about 45 minutes or so.

The PC is sitting on the dining room table with the side cover off and no external peripherals attached. CPU Tommy probably is already laughing.

At this point, the light bulb clicked on. I should hook up a monitor and see where in the boot process it was hanging up.

Now with the monitor attached I booted up and it stalled in the same spot. The onscreen message read "Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue".

D'oh!!!

Needless to say, with everything hooked up and attached in the right jacks, etc., the system booted up properly and I'm relating my long sad tale of woe.

On the plus side, my zombie computer is still kicking along with its new power supply. I take credit for that. I'm also using a different brand of power supply and the PC is now dust-free. There was easily enough fur inside the box to make a new cat when I opened it.

Gotta wonder how to continue by pressing F1 without a keyboard, tho.


New PSU on left, dead PSU on right


Unused connectors in hand


Power supply has left the building


The new PSU has landed


I used to do wiring jobs like this.
Back in the day.

[qquake2k]

Glad you got it working again. Are you going to get a new external hard drive to backup your data to?

And what are you going to name your new cat?

[new2hpr]

It's not Antec or Western Digital that's the problem, it's that fur. Dust accumulation has killed most of the machines that I have helped fix. Make a reminder to bust out the vacuum once a month or so. Yes, it's another annoying task, but it's worth it. Fur blocks airflow, low flow=less cooling, hot chips=dead chips.

-Ken

[fyrwrxz]

Great job mate and good info too! Still LMAO about the key board..I wouldn't have been able to figure that one out! Heck I couldn't find the ANY key!

[Barracuda]

Good job old dude,I make it a habit to vac mine out 2 or 3 times a year.I'm running on an ancient dell laptop,(wife has the desktop)the cpu fan quit about 3 months ago,I bought a cooling fan to put under it from e-bay for 3.00..hasn't missed a beat yet(knock on wood).I'd much rather take them apart and put them together than work behind the keyboard

[o1d_dude]

Glad you got it working again. Are you going to get a new external hard drive to backup your data to?

And what are you going to name your new cat?

Yes, it looks like that's going to be needed.

I like the name "Antec".

It's not Antec or Western Digital that's the problem, it's that fur. Dust accumulation has killed most of the machines that I have helped fix. Make a reminder to bust out the vacuum once a month or so. Yes, it's another annoying task, but it's worth it. Fur blocks airflow, low flow=less cooling, hot chips=dead chips.

-Ken

Hard disk drive mechanisms are manufactured in clean rooms and vacuum sealed as a single grain of dust can ruin the platter(s) surfaces. Hard disk failures are usually related to physical impacts or power failures/fluctuations during the read/write process. Bearings are also known to fail. The external circuit board can be damaged by high heat from any cause (intensive disk operations, lack of ventilation, etc.) . My cases are mostly over-fanned (120mm fans directly behind the hard drive cages) and all contain remote temperature sensors for monitoring purposes.

Power supply failures generally have all been of the "PG" (Power Good) drifting out of spec rather than complete voltage failures. The mobo senses the bad PGM and says "No way, Jose" and shuts itself down to protect the components. This is a Good Thing [tm].

Mrs. OD has a Persian cat and she assures me the "dust bunnies" in the case are not cat fur.

Where I find the "dust bunnies" is in the bottom of the case, in the CPU cooling vanes, and in the video card cooler. The last two are due to the fans driving air down into the structure rather than pushing air past it. Modern CPU and video card coolers now use blowers that drive the airflow across the chip surfaces rather than directly down at it to clear the debris. Who knew?

Older power supplies use exhaust fans out the back of the PC case while modern units use 120mm fans that exhaust into the case or out through the bottom.

The optimum case fan ventilation system draws air from outside the case rather than exhausting air out of the back. Again, who knew?

Anyway, the long and short of it is that nothing lasts forever although one of my current hard drives shows over 70000 service hours via the S.M.A.R.T. read out. Maybe the regular SpinRite treatments are responsible for that.

Good job old dude,I make it a habit to vac mine out 2 or 3 times a year.I'm running on an ancient dell laptop,(wife has the desktop)the cpu fan quit about 3 months ago,I bought a cooling fan to put under it from e-bay for 3.00..hasn't missed a beat yet(knock on wood).I'd much rather take them apart and put them together than work behind the keyboard

Vacuum out the case? Pshaw! I use the leaf blower! About twice a year: Late spring before the high temps of the Central Valley start kicking in, and in the late fall because it's time.

[scsager]

Kit, I certify your post A+

[o1d_dude]

Kit, I certify your post A+

Thanks, Scott!

• Saw the ENIAC on tv as a sprout. Mr. Wizard, I think.
• Did a science project in the sixth grade using pebbles in boxes to program experientially a simple chess game called Hex-A-Pawn based on an article in Scientific American magazine.
• Lee Felsenstein of Osbourne 1 fame was my college roommate. He was also responsible for the SOL but I digress.
• Programmed Altair and IMSAI computers at the Div of Highways in the early 70's.
• Learned to program in mainframe FORTRAN and COBOL a year or two later.
• A series of Apples and TRS-80's followed ultimately leading to 6502 assembly language programming.
• Atari's of any number of model modified to run with extra ram, hard drives, and alternate programming languages.
• Learned to program in C over a weekend which earned me a lot of props from my pals.
• Dial-up bulletin board software with my signature attached, a telecommunication experiment from 1980 until 1986.
• The first "net nanny" language filter and something now called "Shout Box" that have become features on pretty much all forums. Yup, that was my contribution to the net culture.
• Authored a couple of Quake deathmatch maps for fun. "Arena" was the best of them. It owned.
• Worked in the field of telecommunications for the last 20 years of my working life bringing a stodgy state agency from a manual payment system to PCs on every desk, VOIP, network infrastructure on an optical backbone across the entire state.
• Still managed to find time to assemble a series of high boxes for home use.

My two oldest sons are followed in my footsteps and both work in the IT shops of extremely large healthcare organizations. That's where the action is these days now that my generation (boomers) are approaching senility...er, seniority.

Computers have been my life. Not terribly rewarding financially but I have had fun the whole way. Do something you enjoy and you will never work a day of your life.

[The Rocket Kid]

press F1 to continue got to be one of the funniest thngs I've heard in awhile......5 minuets later and still LMAO!!!

[new2hpr]

Hard disk drive mechanisms are manufactured in clean rooms and vacuum sealed as a single grain of dust can ruin the platter(s) surfaces. Hard disk failures are usually related to physical impacts or power failures/fluctuations during the read/write process. Bearings are also known to fail. The external circuit board can be damaged by high heat from any cause (intensive disk operations, lack of ventilation, etc.) . My cases are mostly over-fanned (120mm fans directly behind the hard drive cages) and all contain remote temperature sensors for monitoring purposes.

FYI, I'm not some young know-it-all doofus spouting off. I've spent about 20 years in data storage, specifically hard disk and tape drive heads & media. Just trying to help, not knowing your level of PC expertise. Most of the people I do work for have no idea of any maintenance requirements. They run 'em 'till they break, then call me. I guess that keeps the side money flowing in (and then back out to rockets) -Ken

[o1d_dude]

My apologies if I came across as being an obnoxious "my-kung-fu-is-better-than-yours" computer geek, Ken. It wasn't my intention but I do have tendencies to "over-communicate". See the length of my original post? LOL!
As veterans of the data wars, guys like us have to stick together.