Re: Hard drive power lead question

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"Evils Dark" <insert_user_here@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:894D948C-ECB9-42AC-BF17-689B22718B32@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Jon" wrote:

I am no hardware expert, as you will soon observe.

Turned on one of my computers this morning and it would not boot. It had
been working fine the previous day, with no changes. The hard drive was not
even detected in the BIOS, although the cdrom was.

Took off the case, and swapped the power connector to the hard drive for one
of the spare ones, and now the computer boots. Everything hunky-dory. A case
of a failed power connector. Or so it seems.

I also noticed that the power connector, for which it was not working,
seemed to be linked to the cdrom. So I'm wondering whether it's better
practice to use a power connector for a hard drive, that is not also linked
to any other device, and whether that may have lead to the problem.

Alternatively is it more likely to be symptomatic of a hard drive close to
the end of its life, or some other cause (like a failing motherboard, CMOS
battery etc)? Thanks.


I connected a fan to a drive power cable and the fan ran OK, but a drive on
the same power cable was not detected. Swap the cables back and see if the
drive works OK. If it doesn't, its probably the CD. If it does, it might just
have been loose.

Thanks for your response.

From that, it does sound like having 2 different devices on the same power
cable can sometimes cause problems for one of them. So thanks for confirming that possibility.

Yes, it did occur to me that I may have jogged the machine in some way and hence loosened a power lead. The odd thing is that what seemed like the same problem occurred a few months back, and doing what you suggested solved the problem at that time ie I opened up the machine - unplugged and replugged in a few power connectors, making sure that they were all tight, and the machine then booted fine. Not this time though, unfortunately. Had to swap the power lead for one of the spare ones to get it to work.

Am thinking of adding a new hard drive to the machine in the near future, so may experiment a bit more with it at that stage. Thanks again.

Jon


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