D
Dan Seur
This may be of interest to some:
8 days ago there was a lightning strike within 4-8 blocks of my office.
A few moments later this machine lost power although house power remained.
Within 3-4 minutes the neighborhood lost power, which was restored
within 30 minutes.
I determined the fairly large battery backup/circuit breaker unit
between house power and this machine was irreparably damaged. The
manufacturer agreed and they're replacing it.
This machine seemed to be running fine for the next 4-5 days (off direct
house power through a series of small $5 multiplug protection units I
keep around), except that W2k couldn't get the Adaptec AHA-2940UW PCI
SCSI controller (supporting only a scanner) to run. Driver problem
reported. Didn't waste much time on it, just removed the card. W2k
didn't care, just booted faster.
A couple of days ago the machine started losing power suddenly every 45
minutes or so. Scratched my head, eyeballed cables etc. Kept on going;
the box would reboot if I turned the PC power switch off/on. (It had to
be the switch on the power supply, not the external master multiswitch
into which the PC/printer/scanner/CRT power cords are all plugged.)
During yesterday the frequency of power loss increased to every 5
minutes or so, then late last night it would stay up only about a minute.
It was clear I couldn't even squeeze another email session out of it.
I'd been resisting a lengthy timeout to tackle the problem, just sitting
around cursing and getting exercise reaching all over the place to push
power buttons. Involved in a hot legal issue via email - good excuse, right?
This morning the machine would receive power (fans, LCDs), then power
itself off after 1-3 seconds. Wouldn't reach POST. I stuck my finger in
the wind & decided the odds favored a power supply problem (though I'd
never seen this sort of gradual degradation.) Replaced the power supply,
the box booted and W2k came right up. It's a large tower, 4 big HDDs, 2
CDs of various types, USB gadgetry, mobo sound, LAN, dialup modem,
floppy...and all seemed well. Shoved the SCSI card back in, plugged
flatbed scanner into that, and voila - she's-a run good. W2k tools all
report no problems anywhere.
This symptom set could have been caused by all kinds of things: mobo or
CPU failure, floppy, video (or any other) card failure, power supply,
bad cable or connection, and so on. I guess I got very lucky with
picking the power supply as first choice, altho the absolute power loss
was a big clue. I don't understand at all why the SCSI card problem
occurred, and I'm not going to spend time figuring it out. The scanner's
back online and that's good enough for me.
I've REALLY learned something about lightning, and maybe some reader
will too. The battery/protection box doesn't always stop the surge, and
power supplies don't always fail completely even with a big power surge.
In my case, enough current got through the battery unit's protection
(blowing it out), down the PC cord, and into the power supply to ALMOST
BUT NOT QUITE fry the transformer - which gradually died over the next
week. When I pulled the old power supply and sniffed it...there was a
faint smell of burned out transformer. Life, however, now smells sweet
again.
8 days ago there was a lightning strike within 4-8 blocks of my office.
A few moments later this machine lost power although house power remained.
Within 3-4 minutes the neighborhood lost power, which was restored
within 30 minutes.
I determined the fairly large battery backup/circuit breaker unit
between house power and this machine was irreparably damaged. The
manufacturer agreed and they're replacing it.
This machine seemed to be running fine for the next 4-5 days (off direct
house power through a series of small $5 multiplug protection units I
keep around), except that W2k couldn't get the Adaptec AHA-2940UW PCI
SCSI controller (supporting only a scanner) to run. Driver problem
reported. Didn't waste much time on it, just removed the card. W2k
didn't care, just booted faster.
A couple of days ago the machine started losing power suddenly every 45
minutes or so. Scratched my head, eyeballed cables etc. Kept on going;
the box would reboot if I turned the PC power switch off/on. (It had to
be the switch on the power supply, not the external master multiswitch
into which the PC/printer/scanner/CRT power cords are all plugged.)
During yesterday the frequency of power loss increased to every 5
minutes or so, then late last night it would stay up only about a minute.
It was clear I couldn't even squeeze another email session out of it.
I'd been resisting a lengthy timeout to tackle the problem, just sitting
around cursing and getting exercise reaching all over the place to push
power buttons. Involved in a hot legal issue via email - good excuse, right?
This morning the machine would receive power (fans, LCDs), then power
itself off after 1-3 seconds. Wouldn't reach POST. I stuck my finger in
the wind & decided the odds favored a power supply problem (though I'd
never seen this sort of gradual degradation.) Replaced the power supply,
the box booted and W2k came right up. It's a large tower, 4 big HDDs, 2
CDs of various types, USB gadgetry, mobo sound, LAN, dialup modem,
floppy...and all seemed well. Shoved the SCSI card back in, plugged
flatbed scanner into that, and voila - she's-a run good. W2k tools all
report no problems anywhere.
This symptom set could have been caused by all kinds of things: mobo or
CPU failure, floppy, video (or any other) card failure, power supply,
bad cable or connection, and so on. I guess I got very lucky with
picking the power supply as first choice, altho the absolute power loss
was a big clue. I don't understand at all why the SCSI card problem
occurred, and I'm not going to spend time figuring it out. The scanner's
back online and that's good enough for me.
I've REALLY learned something about lightning, and maybe some reader
will too. The battery/protection box doesn't always stop the surge, and
power supplies don't always fail completely even with a big power surge.
In my case, enough current got through the battery unit's protection
(blowing it out), down the PC cord, and into the power supply to ALMOST
BUT NOT QUITE fry the transformer - which gradually died over the next
week. When I pulled the old power supply and sniffed it...there was a
faint smell of burned out transformer. Life, however, now smells sweet
again.