RYGreene
01-21-2005, 03:50 AM
Hello all,
A month or so back, I replaced the underpowered power supply that came with my case with an Antec Truepower 550. This coincided with my having to replace my motherboard, so I basically had to rip out and re-connect everything.
The first odd thing I noticed was that the fans, lights, etc. immediately turn on when I plug the power cable to the back of the PC. I've never seen that before with the other machines I've built in the past, but then it's been a few years since my last build. The PC doesn't actually start it's power up cycle (I don't see the BIOS screen) until I hold the power button down for a few seconds. Is that normal?
I'm having another problem, which I'm wondering if it might be related. My PC is pretty stable - I can leave it on for days at a time. The problem comes when I turn it off for the night (or in the morning when I leave for work). After it's been idle for a few hours or more, it almost always fails to boot up correctly the first time. It usually gets to the XP login screen, and sometimes to the desktop, before it freezes and then blue-screens. The process usually involves a hard re-boot with the power button, as just pressing reset causes it to freeze on the bios spash screen.
I've been working at this for weeks now, and I'm stumped. Since the event log sometimes complains about not finding hdd0 after a crash, and once in a while the VMI check fails (which I get around by re-arranging the SATA connections for my drives), I bought a PCI SATA card hoping that would fix it. Same results as before, so I'm leaning more toward a power issue (perhaps there's not enough juice to always fire up the drives?). It's hard to remove a drive and diagnose, since rebooting right away doesn't seem to show the symptoms - it's only when it's been off for a while...
Here's my setup:
Antec Truepower 550
AMD 64 3500+ (socket 939)
MSI Neo2 Platinum motherboard
1GB DDR memory (PC3200)
1 WD Raptor (36GB) - Windows drive
1 WD Raptor (72GB) - App drive
1 WD Raptor (36GB) - Swap Drive
nVidia 6800 Ultra
Soundblaster Audigy 2
SATA card (PCI)
Sony DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW Drive
Floppy Drive
Any help, tips, etc. would be greatly appreciated. I was thinking about replacing the 3rd SATA drive (the swap drive) with an IDE one, but I wanted to get some opinions before I start buying more hardware.
Thanks in advance.
A month or so back, I replaced the underpowered power supply that came with my case with an Antec Truepower 550. This coincided with my having to replace my motherboard, so I basically had to rip out and re-connect everything.
The first odd thing I noticed was that the fans, lights, etc. immediately turn on when I plug the power cable to the back of the PC. I've never seen that before with the other machines I've built in the past, but then it's been a few years since my last build. The PC doesn't actually start it's power up cycle (I don't see the BIOS screen) until I hold the power button down for a few seconds. Is that normal?
I'm having another problem, which I'm wondering if it might be related. My PC is pretty stable - I can leave it on for days at a time. The problem comes when I turn it off for the night (or in the morning when I leave for work). After it's been idle for a few hours or more, it almost always fails to boot up correctly the first time. It usually gets to the XP login screen, and sometimes to the desktop, before it freezes and then blue-screens. The process usually involves a hard re-boot with the power button, as just pressing reset causes it to freeze on the bios spash screen.
I've been working at this for weeks now, and I'm stumped. Since the event log sometimes complains about not finding hdd0 after a crash, and once in a while the VMI check fails (which I get around by re-arranging the SATA connections for my drives), I bought a PCI SATA card hoping that would fix it. Same results as before, so I'm leaning more toward a power issue (perhaps there's not enough juice to always fire up the drives?). It's hard to remove a drive and diagnose, since rebooting right away doesn't seem to show the symptoms - it's only when it's been off for a while...
Here's my setup:
Antec Truepower 550
AMD 64 3500+ (socket 939)
MSI Neo2 Platinum motherboard
1GB DDR memory (PC3200)
1 WD Raptor (36GB) - Windows drive
1 WD Raptor (72GB) - App drive
1 WD Raptor (36GB) - Swap Drive
nVidia 6800 Ultra
Soundblaster Audigy 2
SATA card (PCI)
Sony DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW Drive
Floppy Drive
Any help, tips, etc. would be greatly appreciated. I was thinking about replacing the 3rd SATA drive (the swap drive) with an IDE one, but I wanted to get some opinions before I start buying more hardware.
Thanks in advance.