Meltdown reason?

[Woodman]

Hardware - dual 80Gb hard drives (master/slave on same ide), 400W psu, Intel mobo, using ups.

Switched on pc and nothing after bios info.   No error messages of any kind except bootdisk not available.  Tried lots of things without success.   Slaved both drives (one at a time) to another pc and was unable to access the slaved drives which were not seen in bios.   Neither drive was seen when plugged up as master.  The psu fails every test I've tried and the mobo fails when installed with other hardware.

Now my question - in anyones experience is it safe to assume that a failing psu also took out the mobo and both hdd's or could there be another, less obvious, reason?

[GX1_Man]

That is entirely possible, especially with an eMachine. 

If the individual components fail in another system, then you could draw that conclusion. What hardware was involved (including the PSU)?

[ale52]

Ditto GX1-Man on the emachine thing.  I've seen multiple instances where the psu took out the motherboard.  You'll most likely need to replace them both 

Alan <>< 

[Woodman]

Not E-machine - OEM.

PSU Thermaltake XP480 bought as 400w but since posting have read a review here which claims that it's a max 277w.  Than confuses me even more.

Mobo Intel D845BG

Ram 512mb PC2100 DDR Sd

Twin Seagate ST380011A 80Gb Uata/100 hdd

Processor Intel P4 1.6

Nvidea GeForce video card

The Ram, Processor and Video card still work perfectly.

Appreciate that this is not 'new' gear and as such it is prone to failure but am just looking to call on the experience of others.

Thanks for your interest.

[patio]

PSU Calculator

[Woodman]

Thanks Patio - the figure I come up with is 472W so guess I've been lucky the psu didn't blow before now.   Will definitely be more careful in later hardware selections.

[patio]

No problem...and do yourself a favor...don't buy a cheap PSU .

Iv'e seen them blow inside of a week.

[GX1_Man]

Generally $50 or more is a good index. Sometimes you can find a nice Antec on sale at newegg.com