Weak Power Supply gave same symptoms of a failed hard drive

[DaveLembke]

Had some fun yesterday on my day off. Powered up my computer from cold start and it started loading Windows and then it hung. Waited for about 30 sec and it was froze right up. Held power button in to shut system down. Turned back on after 10 sec for everything to wind down and it posted and then came up with:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

So I thought oh great, the C: drive crashed. Great, I havent performed a backup since the 3rd week of August and I have some projects that I didnt back up to anywhere else out of being lazy that I probably lost.

What tipped me off to power supply was the following:

 About 2 weeks ago I added a 3rd hard drive to this system using an available IDE connection to add a 160GB IDE HDD to make room for some games since the 500GB was getting full and taking a performance hit with less than 60GB free. I moved some large games that are played less frequently to the IDE HDD and this opened the 500GB drive up to running more efficient with more free space. The power supply in this computer is rated for 400watts and I figured it was plenty and 2 mechanical hard drives and 1 SSD would be fine on top of the normal power needs of the motherboard & CPU, fans, and ASUS ATI Radeon HD5450 video card.

And when the system booted with the side cover off of it, the CPU fan was spinning slowly instead of fast at power up and then it would spin down to a point that it was no longer spinning. When I saw this I thought why is that CPU fan not spinning anymore and so I gave it a light push with my finger to see if it was bound and it spun free and went a little bit as if its getting a weak voltage output and then slowed  and stopped again. Multimeter read 4.81VDC at the power connector which is way low, and it should be .2V higher. Surprisingly the system did not shut down for the fact that that CPU fan was no longer spinning and I shut it down myself to protect the CPU from cooking.

I removed the 3rd hard drive that was recently introduced and then tried to boot the system and the system now booted with CPU fan 100% speed and then winding down to its normal speed, the mutimeter still connected to the P-connector now read 4.92 VDC cool this may have solved it to limp along until I can get a new PSU, but at post it came up yet again to:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Hmmm ... Maybe the C: drive was damaged by writing to itself during a low voltage condition. Ok time to dig out my Windows 7 Repair Disc. Tried to boot off this Disc and it wouldnt boot off of it. Checked this disc in my wifes computer and it booted fine in her system so the disc is good. I also noticed though that the Biostar Logo Splash screen was no longer showing at boot, so I looked in the BIOS and  everything was set back to defaults and DVD ROM is still primary boot device before HDD, so why is it not booting from the DVD ROM. Maybe I need to unplug the IDE cable from this drive in addition to the P-connector that I unplugged, so I did this and now it booted off this Disc, but the Disc didnt find my Windows installation to repair, rebooted again and went in ans say that my SATA 0 port is connected to my SSD and SATA 1 is connected to the 500GB HDD so I needed to change the boot order to make the HDD the first on the list of drives as for the system was trying to boot off of my SSD instead of the HDD.

Biostar controls to change boot order shows ( - or + ) to move drive up /down on list. Ok no problem held shift and pressed the + key which is the = key if you dont use shift and no change... hmmm ok lets try shift and - ok, still no change... is the PSU so weak that the BIOS is not responding to change requests yet I can navigate to and from this config page... ok lets try the + and - keys which are part of the keypad, YAY those keys work and so I cant use shift and - + on the regular keyboard, I have to use the specific + and - keys which are part of keypad oh well, configured correct boot order and was going through other pages to confirm all is well and saw a typo on the main page ... instead of DEVICE every DEVICE was spelled DEVCIE. Hmm. Surprised I never seen that before. Ok time to save changes and see what happens.

Saved changes, removed the Windows 7 Repair Disc and yay Windows 7 is booting and I logged on and the first thing I did was grab my 500GB external and plug it into the USB port and its an externally powered external drive vs the smaller ones that are powered off of USB power and backed up everything that was important.

I then noticed that my multimeter was still connected to the P-connector and on and it now read 5.06VDC after its been running for about 2 hours. Left it running and gamed last night the games that are on the remaining drives with no problems.

I then just before bed decided to check out my CMOS battery because its very strange that the BIOS set itself back to default. So I carefully measured the CMOS battery with the 2032 battery still inserted in the button cell holder and it read 3.04volts so the battery is good. Ok now to test that the computer still boots to make sure I didnt accidentally clear the CMOS BIOS settings when poking around to find the voltage between battery and the CMOS reset jumper pin. System booted with no problems so settings remained.

*** So lesson learned... "Backup Frequently if not using RAID!!!", and dont always suspect the hard drive as crashed when you get an error of:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Ordered a new Corsair CX500 500Watt PSU, so going to limp along until it comes in, and frequently save to a USB flash drive for anything important because its running on weak PSU that seems to strengthen when warm and it could cause more headache before new PSU arrives. This is not what I wanted to do on my day off 

[Computer_Commando]

...
When I saw this I thought why is that CPU fan not spinning anymore and so I gave it a light push with my finger to see if it was bound and it spun free and went a little bit as if its getting a weak voltage output and then slowed  and stopped again. Multimeter read 4.81VDC at the power connector which is way low, and it should be .2V higher. Surprisingly the system did not shut down for the fact that that CPU fan was no longer spinning and I shut it down myself to protect the CPU from cooking.
...
Ordered a new Corsair CX500 500Watt PSU, so going to limp along until it comes in.

Fans are all 12VDC, not 5VDC.  Desktop drives are 12VDC, as is just about everything else.  Test the PSU 12V.
BTW, voltage tolerances are:  ( i.e. 4.81V is good)

Supply [V]    Tolerance    Range (min. to max.)    
+5 VDC    ±5% (±0.25 V)    +4.75 V to +5.25 V
+12 VDC    ±5% (±0.60 V)    +11.40 V to +12.60 V

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for the tolerance update. I thought it was +/- .10 VDC not +/- .25VDC so it is within .06 on the 5V side at 4.81 when it was cold booted.

Also thanks for clarifying for others, You are correct about the 12V for drives and fans. I was writing this in sections between support calls and thought I edited it to put all details in when submitting this.

I didnt measure the 12V from P-connector as for I assumed the 12V was low along side the 5V and when removing this extra drive when I saw the 5V climb by .11volts immediately to 4.92VDC, I assumed that the 12V climbed with it with a weak PSU that was weighed down by excessive load.

I also forgot to mention that I removed the IDE HDD and powered it up in an older IDE/USB external case I have and the drive functions fine, so its not a misdiagnosis of PSU which could have been this IDE drive as the bad component to cause this mess.

 The IDE drive is healthy and seeing the 5V climb from 4.92V to 5.06V slowly when warm after 2 hours to me means that this 400watt no name PSU likely is weak when cold or not quite a 400watt as its labelled as and maybe its really only able to handle 250 or 300watts instead in which 2 HDD's, 1SSD, 1 DVD-ROM, ASUS ATI Radeon HD5450 PCI Express video card and 2 extra 80mm fans I added, 1 for venting hot air from minitower and 1 to blow across the face of the passive heatsink of the video card. I had a case in storage that came with a 400watt no name PSU and installed that PSU into this case.

 Have been using this PSU for about 4 months on my old gaming rig after moving my Athlon II x4 620 quadcore CPU and better PSU to new build which is waiting for the AMD FX-8350 4Ghz 8-core in a few weeks, ( birthday present to self  upgrade ), for the AM3+ motherboard in new gaming tower that I havent really used yet with 8GB DDR3. And I placed a cheap AM2 dual-core into this prior system with AM2+ motherboard and 4GB RAM, but instead of using my new computer, I ran this older gaming system instead of the new system because it has all the games on it and the dual-core AMD Athlon X2 4450B 2.3Ghz actually runs quite well for a $10 used CPU off of ebay.

*Also not stated is that this system about a week ago I left running overnight and when I woke up it was powered off. It is powered through a battery backup and in my bedroom so power outages at night wake me up with the beeping when they thankfully rarely occur, but the system shut itself down. I checked the event logs and I know when it went down and Windows had it logged as a power failure. For the fact that the system was running otherwise healthy I thought that maybe the old hardware crashed and it was a freak occurance. Then about a week later as of yesterday I experienced this mess.

[Computer_Commando]

It probably is overloaded & not weak.  Never look at watts, only look at amps on the label.  Watts is usually a marketing designation, amps ratings are supposed to be measured while watts can be calculated a number of ways.  Most psu's now have two 12V rails (independent).  Some of the voltages are shared by the same rail.

Needed voltages are now generated by the motherboard instead of the psu, +5 is only used by some LED's & IDE notebook drives, don't remember what else; don't think 3.3VDC & -5VDC are used by anything anymore, -12VDC was used by serial and/or parallel ports.  +5VDCStandy is separate & still used.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for info Computer_Commando ... I suppose I will mark this PSU with a permanent marker for use in a single hard drive system and save this PSU for a system with lesser power demands vs tossing it, since it may be overloaded vs weak and me adding the drive was the tipping point 2 weeks ago that didnt really show until yesterday, even though the system shutting itself down on its own that one night was a warning sign as well.

[BC_Programmer]

I had a similar symptom with my Pentium II era machine. I do not know the wattage of the Power Supply, but it was and still is one of the loudest power supplies I've ever heard. Symptoms were pretty much anything. Sometimes the video dispaly was garbled and I would get a Long beep followed by three short beeps. Sometimes it would boot fine but not detect a drive.

Usually, however, the drive simply vanished from the system while the system was powered on. Usually my third hard drive. The fact that i had almost every single PCI slot with a sound card, network card, wireless card, USB 2 host adapter, AGP card, not to mention maxing the motherboard out at 512MB of RAM probably contributed strongly to the weak, decades old Power Supply not being particularly happy about it.

After I had replaced that PC with something else for everyday I ended up replacing the CPU, PSU, and the CPU Fan for about 40 dollars. I didn't use it extensively after that but it ran much quieter and was far more reliable, though I think the years of running with a less-than-adequate PSU took it's toll on the motherboard since some of the slots didn't work.