I have a 3.2 ghz machine that I bought just over a year ago, of course a 1 year warrenty. A few weeks ago a series of problems began poping up.
The first problem was after a few seconds after turning the power on my system would die. In other words it would start to boot correctly but then crap out. Usually after a dozen or more times of this it would finally boot up ok.
To try and diagnose the problem I opened the case up and systematically began disconnecting hardware components. So first the floppy drive, but still died. Then the DVD drive, but still died. Then the harddrive, and it booted ok!! So i connected everything back up but the harddrive and it booted ok repeatedly. So I thought it was the harddrive. But at the same time I thought maybe it wasn't. You see if I can get the sucker to boot, I can use it for days, with all kind of intense harddrive access and it will never fail. So just to make sure I thought I would do a little more testing. So after my usual dozen times of getting it to boot up with the harddrive connected I starting trying to access other pieces of hardware that I rarely use. So I stuck a floppy into the floppy drive and tried doing some reading and writing, but everything seemed ok. Then I tried reading and writing from the dvd drive. And to my amazement even accessing the dvd drive caused my system to crash. And not only once, but several times, and everytime. So then I thought it has to be the dvd drive. But as I said before if I totally disconnect the dvd drive with the harddrive still connected it will always fail.
So to make a long story evey longer, I am running around in circles trying to find this problem. I am guessing it might be the power supply. But the fact that the piece of crap will work for days if I don't touch the dvd drive makes me think otherwise.
Can anyone help me here? Or point me to a website that has a flow diagram of how to diagnose hardware problems?
Thanks a lot - Don
