Member Avatar for Seegeta

I recently had a 400 watt power supply die on me so when replacing it I moved up to a 500 watt. Upon connecting the power supply for some reason I can get everything from my motherboard and Processor to my Video card and 2x 120mm case fans to run but any time i connect my hard drive everything fails to turn on. I believe it is a power issue but with the increase in power from my original Power Supply to the new one i cannot understadn what would be going wrong. Is there a specific way required in connecting a Sata hard drive that i have overlooked or could it possibly be a bad hard drive causing the problem?

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Useful follow-ups to the replies from , and — their checks point in the right direction. The behavior described most commonly means a short or a PSU protection event when that SATA device is attached; below are practical, non-destructive steps and the most likely causes to confirm or rule out.

  1. Try a different SATA power lead or a different connector on a modular PSU.
  2. Inspect the drive PCB and the mating connector for burned plastic, bent pins, or metal debris.
  3. Boot the system with only the PSU, motherboard, GPU and one stick of RAM, then attach the drive. If attaching the drive kills power immediately the drive/cable is suspect.
  4. Test the drive in another known-good system or test a known-good drive in this system.
  5. If available, use a PSU tester or multimeter to check rails, or swap in a known-good PSU before opening the case further.

Likely causes and what they mean: a shorted drive PCB or a damaged cable will cause modern PSUs to go into protective shutdown (overcurrent/short protection). A modular cable plugged incorrectly or a miswired adapter can short rails. Less common: a failing PSU that trips only when an added load appears. These are covered in basic PSU troubleshooting guides such as How-To Geek’s walk-through for testing supplies and the PSU overview on Wikipedia for protection behavior.

If a different cable or drive clears the problem, replace the failed part. If the problem persists with multiple drives and cables, stop using that PSU and replace or return it — intermittent shorts can damage other components. For step-by-step meter-based testing see and for background on PSU protections see Wikipedia: Power supply unit (computer).

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Member Avatar for jbennet

are you connecting it using the sata-type power connector or the ide-type one? never use both at once

Member Avatar for Lemmor

To determine if the hard disk is really the problem, you stated that the system fails every time you connect the power supply of the hard drive, this means that you need to try connecting a different hard disk, if it works, well it seems that the power part of the hard drive causes the problem.

This happens to me but on a CD-ROM drive, I thank God for that... Good luck.

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