Can a PSU cause HD to not be detected?

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WaterWatcher

Hi all. I've a 2 1/2 year old 30GB Maxtor drive that intermittently is not
detected by the system, first with an ASUS motherboard and now with a new
BioStar motherboard with a new drive cable. The processor is a Duron 750
and the only other drives are a floppy and a CDROM and I'm using the onboard
sound and NIC. I've tested the drive with Maxtor's PowerMax software and it
says it's OK. Do you think that the PSU could be causing this problem?
It's an older PowerMan 235W model. When the drive isn't detected the system
emits a beep-beep sound followed by a pause, and then repeats, but even
that's not consistently happening. Any ideas?

Thanks,
WW
 
Hi all. I've a 2 1/2 year old 30GB Maxtor drive that intermittently
is not detected by the system, first with an ASUS motherboard
and now with a new BioStar motherboard with a new drive cable.
The processor is a Duron 750 and the only other drives are a
floppy and a CDROM and I'm using the onboard sound and NIC.
I've tested the drive with Maxtor's PowerMax software and it says
it's OK. Do you think that the PSU could be causing this problem?
Click to expand...

Its certainly possible, but not all that likely given the beeps.
It's an older PowerMan 235W model.
Click to expand...

Thats a bit marginal for a duron, but
shouldnt produce that particular symptom.
When the drive isn't detected the system emits a
beep-beep sound followed by a pause, and then repeats,
Click to expand...

Most likely a motherboard problem. Does the motherboard
manual list the beep codes ? If not, which bios, AMI, Award etc.
 
First thing, try the other IDE channel. Then remove all cards except video.

The BIOS may not be waiting long enough for drive initialization, whereas
PowerMax does.
 
Eric Gisin said:
First thing, try the other IDE channel. Then remove all cards except video.

The BIOS may not be waiting long enough for drive initialization, whereas
PowerMax does.
Click to expand...

Tried your suggestions but no go. I bought a new 300w PSU but then the
drive wasn't detected after several attempts, so I put the original PSU back
in and that didn't work, so I tried to slave the Maxtor to another drive in
another computer and THAT didn't work. So, as a last resort, I put it back
in its original computer with its original PSU and it has booted up several
times without a hitch. I backed up the drive using Drive Image and asked
Maxtor for an RMA. I'm not too hopeful that Maxtor is going to be
cooperative though if they test it and don't find a problem.

I guess it's new drive shopping time. What's the latest for drive
reliability? Maxtor, WD, Seagate, Hitachi?

WW
 
WaterWatcher said:
Hi all. I've a 2 1/2 year old 30GB Maxtor drive that
intermittently is not detected by the system, first with
an ASUS motherboard and now with a new BioStar motherboard
with a new drive cable. The processor is a Duron 750 and
the only other drives are a floppy and a CDROM and I'm
using the onboard sound and NIC. I've tested the drive
with Maxtor's PowerMax software and it says it's OK. Do
you think that the PSU could be causing this problem?
It's an older PowerMan 235W model. When the drive isn't
detected the system emits a beep-beep sound followed by
a pause, and then repeats, but even that's not consistently
happening. Any ideas?
Click to expand...

I think that the only way to reliably tell if the PSU is OK is by
measuring its voltages with a digital multimeter (mobo hardware
sometimes gives really wrong readings).

I had a super-cheap 250W PSU that would power a 1.3 GHz Duron with
nothing but a slow graphics card (Intel i740) for only 30 seconds at a
time, but this PSU was able to run a 1.7 GHz Celeron with CD-ROM,
floppy, 5400 RPM HD, and that same graphics card. This PSU was so bad
that PC Power & Cooling shows it as an example of how bad a cheap PSU
can be. So I would expect a 235W Powerman to be more capable,
especially because it's made by Fortron-Source, which is known to
underrate its PSUs.

I had an instance where a 300W PSU prevented the HD from working, not
because it couldn't put out enough power but because the hardware
wasn't applying enough of a load to it, and this caused its +12V rail
to put out less than +11V when 466 MHz Celeron was used with it, but
it was fine with the above CPUs.
 
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