Broken power supply?

[bitnet]

Recently I lost my 40Gb Fujitsu hd. I was really sad about it, but after some searches I've decided that such stuff happens.

I had my old desktop PC up on a closet, so I thought I 'borrow' it's 850 mg HD for a while. I've practically got far as formatting it, trying to do a Gentoo install ( and reformatting again, to have it as a storage for my files, whilist working with LiveCD.

Anywat, after some playing with it, I left computer, with hd mounted, to just be in a corner and after some time, hd started making similar noises! Of a kind what my previous HD did, before dying! Now I'm thinking that, what if my power suppl yis malfuctioning??

1) How can you determine if your power supply is screwing up?

2) Can malfuncing power supply fry my comp? I.e. is it safe for me to use PC with LiveCD, but just not mounting the HD? Or is the situation with Hds just a coincidense?

3) If a HD is connect properly, inside the case and is absolutely unreadable, it's totally screwed right? (I mean BIOS nor fdisk/fsck can read it)

Any help is appreciated! I don't know what to do :O, I'm definately not paying anyone money for messing with my hardware

[bitnet]

!!!

My comp just did that loud clunk followed by a whining sound of spinning?

My HD is unmounted at moment.

[skywarp]

First, I am not an expert in this stuff but I once had trouble with powersupplies, too.

[Raistlin]

Hi,

well, I'd say the chances are rather high that the hd is screwed if you didn't touch it and it went bad suddenly...
Of course first check the cables. But I had a similar issue some weeks ago: My PC ran smoothly, but all of a sudden one day, as I turned it on, the BIOS didn't detect the HD anymore
Luckily, it still had warranty, but the data was lost, of course...
Maybe I'd been able to recover the data, if it had been a broken HD-controller and if I had a identical, working disk. Then I would have taken the working controller and attached it (on a temporarily basis, of course) to the "broken" hd.
But
1) this would have been a big lottery and
2) I didn't have an identical hd...

Hope you're lucky and may resolve the problem with a new cable

Cheers, R.
_________________
Zwei Was Eins Initially

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

[groovin]

if its the HD making the clunk, then it's dead. so i guess it depends on whats making the noise. clunking noises are not good at all.

[bitnet]

Changed the cables. hda cannot be read, 850 one work ok, but I think it'll start making noises after some time again.

My friend is supposed to lend me his old 200W? power supply for a while, so I could check... I'm so screwed.

[bonbons]

Try running with no HDD connected, just using LiveCD.
If the PC starts doing unexpected noise it's not the HDD, but maybe some FAN...

If you motherboard supports lm_sensors you might want to look at the voltage provided by you powersupply. (BIOS should then also offer to show that info)

Regarding broken powersupplys, I've a powersupply that partially died, suddenly it was hard to get the PC running (had to switch power on, but leave the PC off for around 5 minutes until starting it would succed, otherwise disks were permanentally triing ti spin-up without success and board resetting each time. Looks like supply lost about 50% of it's power)
Once the system was up it run completely stable though.

[bitnet]

That hd is rather old, I don't think is supports SMART. Is there any way to run diagnostics on it?

I'm going to get a working? power supply today and I'm going to try to write something big down on that hd. Va bank )