Replaced bad hdd, wierd PSU problems?

TrumandrummerTrumandrummer Taylor Michigan Icrontian
edited December 2008 in Hardware
Ok, so I was helping a friend fix a computer a few weeks back. It seemed as if it was a hard drive failure. Tests showed hdd failure too...

So we ordered a new hdd and started clean......
Everything seemed fine, but now the computer is acting very weird.
Sometimes out of nowhere it gets really loud and freezes, and starts beeping....
When it does this, you can turn the computer off and on a bunch of times, and it wont stop. But as soon as I took out the hdd, and tried it. The computer worked fine. When I put the hdd back in, it still is working fine. But from what they described to me, it works fine sometimes and then out of nowhere, it will freak out.

So im thinking maybe it has something to do with the power supply? maybe?
when it is freaking out, it is super loud, you can hear it from other rooms. but the fans appear to be working fine..... so I don't know where the noise is coming from.

any ideas?

Comments

  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    Or, something is overheating and a cooling fan spins up to maximum RPM. You wrote "loud," so I assume that's a fan or fans.
    when it is freaking out, it is super loud, you can hear it from other rooms. but the fans appear to be working fine.....
    Maximum fan rotation speed is working fine, just at max. If by "fine" you mean at normal speed, then please explain what you mean by "loud" and "freaking out." Sorry, but we need you to be less vague.
  • TrumandrummerTrumandrummer Taylor Michigan Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    Thanks for the reply Leonardo

    Well yes the fans seem to be running at normal speed, it does not look like they are running any slower.

    The tower gets a really loud vibrating like sound.... at the same time there is an annoying beep going on, and it will not turn on when this is happening. It does not even attempt to boot the BIOS or anything. I hope this is a better explanation, sorry :D
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    The tower gets a really loud vibrating like sound.... at the same time there is an annoying beep going on, and it will not turn on when this is happening
    You need an exorcist! :eek:

    That sounds like a CD drive spinning with an imbalanced disk.

    You may be right, this may be a PSU problem. Do you guys have a spare PSU with which to test? The beep code could be a number of things: motherboard gone bad, bad RAM, PSU problems.
  • TrumandrummerTrumandrummer Taylor Michigan Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    Lol, yea I called a priest, but he hung up on me when I asked him if he could give a computer an exorcism. :D;)

    Umm yea, I do believe they have a spare computer over there. Its a few years old though but the PSU is probably fine, I am gonna give that a go tomorrow when I go back over there.

    If it was a bad motherboard or ram would the computer turn on at all?
    like this will keep doing it for a long time. I restarted it 10-20 times and it wouldn't work at all. popped the hdd out and back in, and it worked.... and they tell me that it does that. That it will randomly work sometimes.

    thanks for the help
  • KhaosKhaos New Hampshire
    edited December 2008
    Sounds like a power problem, but the culprit might not be the PSU.

    I just had a really weird case similar to this with my sister's computer. Her PSU would go nuts and spin up the fans to MAXIMUM POWAR for no apparent reason. Removing the cold cathode light, which has a 12V DC to AC inverter box built-in, fixed the problem completely. Not only did the PSU stop going into hair-dryer mode, but a couple of the other fans in the system and the hard drive stopped behaving erratically.

    For all the world, I cannot explain this phenomenon with electrical engineering. I can only guess at the inverter going bad and introducing some serious flux into the capacitors, so to speak. In other words, tons of current/and-or voltage variance which can make all kinds of stuff go nuts.

    AC leakage onto DC circuits is also a not-so-good thing.

    So I guess what I'm getting at is that you should try isolating the problem by removing ALL components that aren't absolutely critical to start-up the next time it happens. That means unplug your CD drives, and case lighting, extra case fans, remove extra PCI cards.

    You want to boot it with only the main hard drive, RAM, processor and graphics card hooked up.

    Once you do a clean boot with minimal hardware, see if the problem persists like you've already described.

    If it still happens repeatedly even after restarts, then it's probably the PSU.

    If it stop happening, then something connected to the PSU is probably making the system go nuts. Try finding out what it is by putting things back in one at a time.

    This may be tricky to diagnose, but with patience you should be able to figure it out through process of elimination.

    Good luck!
  • TrumandrummerTrumandrummer Taylor Michigan Icrontian
    edited December 2008
    Thanks a lot Khaos

    Sounds like you may be right, because when it wouldn't turn on and kept making those noises, and I pulled out the hdd, it started fine. I even placed a different hard drive in there and booted it fine. Then I put the original hdd back in and it still started fine.

    When I go back over there, I am going to try all of this. Unplugging some stuff like you said. If I get no results I am gonna try a different PSU also.

    The only thing is, this is like a stock computer. No case lights really. Just a cd drive, hard drive, and the bare necessities to run the computer.
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