Hi,

I turned on my PC last night and the computer powered up for about a second then died. However the power light stayed on but none of the fans were going. I messed around with my PC and found out that if I disconnected one of my hard drivers the computer powered up. The hard drive I disconnected is my main drive and all my information is stored on this Hard drive. Does anyone know if this problem is fixable or is there anyway I could recover the data without paying loads of money to get expert to recover the data.

Cheers,

You might have a bad power supply or it might not be giving enough juice to power everything. Do you have another power supply to test.

Or you might have a bad hard drive.

Best way to check, if you have a friend with a PC, is to oull the drive out of your system. change the jumper setting to 'slave' and pop it in another system. If your files can be accessed on it without problems, then it's probably fine. If you can get it temporarily fitted into a system with a CD burner, then you could copy your important data to CD.

I have a spare power supply somewhere in my house. I have a look for that when I get home and try that (fingers crossed).

Cheers for the advise

Catweazle,

I am going to check the powersupply first and if that fails I am going to do what you suggested and take it round a friends house.

Thanks for the advise

Hi,

I changed the PSU and it the computer worked fine for about 3 hours then died again. If I try and power the machine up nothing happens - no lights or fans go, however the motherboard light is on. Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening?

It could possibly be the power cable, replace that one too because i've had that happen but it's very rare.

What kind of power supply are you using (250,300,350,400) ?

and list your specs here like:

- # of hard drives
- # of optical drives
- cpu
- any other hardware that could be drawing power (i.e. pci cards)
- video card