Problem: A customer called and said that their PC was not working. I arrived and turned on
the monitor and found that it worked. I pressed the PC power on and nothing happened. Crawled into the small
space provided and looked at the back of the PC. Nothing was connected. Then it was said that a "friend" had
looked at it. After reconnecting everything to the back of the PC, including Power, it still did not come on.
I said I would have to take it back to my shop. There I found, after opening the case, that none of the Power Supply
connections were connected AND the HeatSink for the CPU had been broken loose. Not just removed, but broken.
Further Analyzation: Replaced Power Supply. Did not fix. However, at power on the supply fan would start to
spin and then quit. Something killing the PS?? What??
- PSU test - Shorted Green to Black - PS stays on. PSU OK???
- CPU - Overheating - but in only 2 or 3 secs??
- CPU fan not connected. Has detection??
- RAM Stick out - No help
- Modem Card out - No help
- Drives disconnected - No Help
- Removed CPU - Can now get Power to stay on!!
The fix After embarrassing my self for to long a time,
I got the system to operate. The P4 CPU was bad. I found
during this ordeal that all P4's are not interchangeable. Besides speed, there is also the technology. I
purchased a replacement P4, at our local 'puter store and it didn't kill the power like the original but it would not work. Thinking
that there was something else wrong with the Mother Board, I looked for a replacement. The MB in this system
had sockets for both SDRAM and DDR. Could not use both at the same time. A suitable replacement could not be
found locally. I found another one on the Internet.
Unfortunately, the new MB did not fix the problem either. I either had gotten
another bad MB or another bad CPU. This is when I learned
of the tech difference. The original P4 was of the Northwood technology and the
first one I purchased was of the Prescott technology. The Prescott P4
would not work in a board set up to handle a Northwood P4. Fortunately the local store took
back the Prescott P4. Another Northwood P4 was not available locally.
I searched the net and found one. Finally I was able to power up the PC and almost get it to work. I could
finally get into the BIOS and look at the ROM software. However, it would not boot-up from the HD.
This was a WinXP system and I figured the P4 change and MB change was to much for it to handle.
So I asked the customer for the recovery disks. She did not have any. This company had placed a recovery partition
on the HD, similar to what I had experienced with my HPs. There was a recovery, if you can call it that, floppy disk
that co-coordinated the operations of recovery with the special recovery partition. I tried this and there were claims
from the software that there were bad sectors in the system sectors. My logical conclusion at this point was that
either the HD was bad and must be replaced or at least needed to be reformatted. Either meant that the recovery
partition would be lost. The company was contacted and after signing in blood that we would be good they sent a recovery
CD. Once again I ran into problems with the original HD.
So, off to the local 'puter store for a new HD. One of the same type and size, a Western digital WD800 80GB
was purchased. I got the same bad results. Frustrated!! What ... just what is wrong. Now my thinking and trouble-shooting
went haywire. I got another drive, a Maxtor 80GB. Just because I like them and have always had good luck with them. Well,
things got worse!
I was at my wits end. I set all aside and went off to relax and think. Something that I should have done
sooner, but we all make mistakes. (Hopefully, after reading this you won't make the same ones.) I had obtained a recovery CD
from Viscom and Western Digital Lifeguard Tools from Net. The two together would not produce a system disk.
- I ran Lifeguard, set MBR, setup drive, which really goes to fast.
- At start of XP install, via the CD, the whole disk is 100% formatted.
- At the finish of the format it says: "Setup could not format the disk. Pick another partition."
Now this is a fine howdy-do. I run WD software and it appears to work, and then I run the start of the WinXP
software and it appears to work .... but they are not. I removed the BIOS chip from the old Mother Board and placed
it in the new MB. Still no dice. #@&*!! This really shouldn't be all that hard!!!
Now then, as was mentioned in the beginning, one of her friends had "looked" at the PC.
The HD was a 7200rpm drive and it had one of the 80-wire IDE cables connected to it. However, it, the 80-wire
cable was also connected to a DVD drive. This should be ok ... shouldn't it?
(Cable Question)
Welllll, not really, evidently. Further investigation of the system showed that a 40-wire IDE cable was connected to
a CD-RW drive but that it was in backwards. The middle connector was close to the MB instead of the Drive(s). I
reversed the 40-wire cable, disconnected the 80-wire from the DVD and hooked the CD-RW and DVD to the 40-wire cable.
The only item now connected to the 80-wire cable was the HD. The system worked!!!... as it should.
The CPU was really bad but the rest of the problems were caused by someone else not hooking back up
things as they were found. My unfamiliarity with the system did not help. Through searching sites and corresponding with
Viscom and Western Digital I did learn a lot. So in the long run it was very beneficial. Just a frustrating way to
learn.
Trouble Shooting - Hardware