I have a couple of old (5 years I guess) pc’s which are basically identical as to motherboard and other components. They aren’t flash but they do the job.
About ten days ago the main one (I’ll call it computer A) stopped booting. Fans on, but no POST beep, nothing on screen, nada. I did the usual thing and stripped it back to a motherboard with CPU, PSU, one memory stick, and video card. Still nothing. I then started on the usual swapping in and out of spare PSU, memory stick and video card to try to isolate the problem. Still nothing.
Despairing of fixing the problem I then put the hard drive (WD standard ATA) from computer A into computer B so that we could use computer B as our main computer and that worked fine. For about a week. Then that computer started behaving exactly the same as computer A.
Since they have no components in common apart from the hard drive I swapped from A to B, there seem to be a couple of possibilities. The first is that I’ve just been unlucky and the occurrence of the same problem to two computers inside a week is a co-incidence. The other is that the hard drive is a mobo killer. Is this possible?
Oh yeah, it’s easily possible. I had a killer hard drive take out two motherboards before I realized it was the problem.
Usually the bad hard drive won’t function normally at all, but it is possible that yours is over-stressing your motherboard and causing it to fail even though it runs almost normally for a week or so.
Any suggestions on how I can diagnose if the H/D is the problem? I’d like ideally to hook the hard drive up to a new mobo and suck all the data off it before I throw it, but knowing it may just kill the next one too is a bit of a problem.
For some reason the lyrics to Talking Heads “Psycho Killer” keep coming to me…
I’d put it in an eSATA or IDE ( IDE is also ATA, as in PATA as opposed to SATA: both are standards… ) Dock or just a simple External Case, connected by USB or eSATA or Firewire, and hook the dock via the right cable. As the docks come with power connectors to electric plugs, it would also be less strain on the PSU.
They read exactly the same and you could copy the data straight to the new HD etc…
Of three old SATA disks I used in a recent Akasa Dock only one didn’t work, confirming it was dead forever without the annoyance of turning off the computer, installing the HD, looking at the BIOS, hoping the OS will see the HD, freezing the computer, turning off the computer and throwing the drive far away.
I’d guess they cost around $10 in the States.
Thanks for the suggestions. As a matter of curiosity, if the H/D is killing motherboards, how would it be doing this? What is the physical mechanism of stress?
Use this. $9 plus shipping, interfaces IDE or SATA to USB, also includes power supply for drive. Great gadget to have around. No case needed unless you just don’t care for the look of random electronic parts strewn across your desk. Me, I like it.
I don’t know that much about computers, but a thread here indicates that some faulty drives could short circuit, overvolting the board transiently; but that seems unlikely ( but possible ) in this case if both computers are now behaving well with other drives.
More likely the strain of trying to read ( and write ) to a failing disk stresses all components.
Another link shows that an HD in an external case can damage PCs especially the motherboard, but that was due to the case shorting and not the drive doing any damage.
A lot of computer problems are down to inadequate PSUs ( Bad RAM is next: then HDs. Usually once they work, CPUs and motherboards carry on working. PSUs and RAM can go wrong in a flash. ) Could be your PSUs at fault as well.
The ATA spec doesn’t include any real protection for things like overvoltages and signals that are shorted or are otherwise drawing too much current. The hard drive could be pulling too much current through the motherboard’s controller chip or it could be presenting an overvoltage on one of the signals that is causing too much current to flow into the controller chip. Either way the controller chip gets stressed and eventually fails.
There are an awful lot of ways that these kinds of hardware faults can occur. For example, one of the I/O or data inputs on the drive could have been damaged by a manufacturing flaw or by a static electricity discharge, and now whenever that line becomes active it draws too much current. Another example would be a voltage regulator circuit on the disk drive starting to fail, and it is spitting out voltage spikes or its output voltage is too high now. There are a lot of other possibilities too.
Musicat, ordered me one of those using ebay from an HK seller. A$8.88 including postage to Australia. I have NFI how those guys manage to even do shipping for that price, but I’ve bought heaps of gadgets this way and it seems to work.
Even if I don’t use it for this problem, it seems like a cool thing to have for the toolbox generally
Even more useful is its slightly bigger brother (costing all of $1 more), which allows one to hook up SATA drives in addition to the 2.5", 3.5" or 5.25" IDE (only one at a time, though).
I am trying to compare those two models, and it looks like the bigger one does allow simultaneous hookup of IDE & SATA. Geeks.com sells another model for $13, but I think that just gives you some backup software.
Either way, one of the best bargains around and the handiest gadgets in my toolbox. I take one on the road to connect an internal DVD drive to a Netbook sometimes. Like GunsNSpot, I have two, too.
