I have an unkonwn ATX case with a M-TEC MPS-8804 250w power supply.
Installed MSI 6395 MB with Slot A Athalon 500-fan attached housing.
System was reported to be "dead" off and on.....

Power light would come on and the system would shut down in 2 seconds.

System was configured with Mode 4 CD-rom and UDMA 4 HD but using a 40 conductor cable in an "official" (blue) 80 conductor socket. CD and HD on separate IDE channels.

Anyway I cleared the BIOS and installed the 80 conductor cable and had no problems for a while. I tried to run SIS sandra and the system would shut down on most modules. (all power off)

I created another paritiion to see how XP would run (currently using 98se). XP loaded OK but treats the "shutdown commands" and "standby"
and non-ACPI, in other words it goes into "safe to turn of your computer" screen. (device mangler says all OK)

Anyway the question is: When I turn on the switch at the power supply, on the back of the box -- the power led AND the CD-ROM "busy" light flashes. Is this normal? Could this mean the power supply is bad or the MB is shorted? The power on/off button works correctly. (in front)

If you flip the switch in back several times in a row the lights stay off after the first "blink". I don't think there is a good reason the CD-rom light to blink. I think the power supply or mainboard is leaking a charge to the wrong part of the board....and IDE cable..

Anything I can do "without" getting another ATX power-supply, or taking the MB out of the case?

PS:Bios settings are set to optimal default.

Any comments appreciated.

:confused: :confused:

Sounds either like a slightly underpowered or faulty PS, and problably no way to know for sure without swapping it with another one......

I've seen PSUs that spin fans and power up drives momentarily when they're switched on or plugged in and it doesn't necessarily mean they're broken, but since this isn't the only issue, it may very well be bad.

As far as the Windows XP issues, this is common on some boards that don't report their ACPI capabilities to Windows properly. You can try these steps:

1)Go to Control Panel, then goto Power Options. Click on the APM Tab, then check the "Enable Advanced Power Management support."

2)Go to Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager. Click View and "Show hidden devices" look for something that is disabled that says ACPI or similar and enable it.

For the second thing, you'll have to reboot before it will do anything, but that may work...

The box has been returned to owner. I didn't "claim" to fix it.

I rebooted 30 times over a 3 day period and also sent it into standby several times without an error.

The only way to tell anything was wrong with was to run SIS Sandra utilities.

I have had to disable ACPI before to make windows 2000 machines to "work" right.

Thanks