| From: D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh@mimosa.com> | Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:54:39 -0400 (EDT) | Subject: war story (spoiler: dying power supply takes disk drive with it) Another war story. | I replaced the power supply with a CoolerMaster RP-650-PCAR that I | happened to have in inventory. | | Still no joy. When I turned power on, the CPU fan would jiggle once but | there was no other sign of life. | | When I unplugged all the peripherals, power seemed to work. I have a similar symptom in another computer. I narrowed it down to the motherboard: when everything was removed from the MB (all connections) and it was placed on a non-conductive table, with a new power supply, I got the same behaviour. Since the computer is about 8 years old, it isn't worth putting a lot of time into fixing the motherboard. So I stopped diagnosing at this point. The reason I mention it is to hightlight that the symptom (when power supply plugged in, the fans start up but shut down after a second or less; case fan spins slowly) seems to be non-specific. When I first encountered the symptom today, I went back in my TLUG archives because I vaguely remembered having posted something with this symptom. Too bad that the old posting turned out not to be useful. For the curious, here is more of the old posting: | A process of elimination showed that the problem came up only when I | connected one of my Seagate 7200.11 drives. | | It seems that the power supply death agony caused the 12V TVS | (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_voltage_suppression_diode>) to | blow. | | I was able to get the disk working again (and the data recovered) by | removing the dead TVS. See | <http://forum.hddguru.com/help-with-disconnecting-tvs-from-seagate-barracuda-7200-t15313.html> | | To get at the TVS, I needed to remove the drive's PC board. That | required a TORX T6 tool which is moderately hard to find. I got one | at Lowes. | | I measured the resistance (DVM on 200 ohm scale) across each TVS and | found it to be close to 0 on the 12V TVS. | | I poked at the 12V TVS with a fingernail and it came off. I guess that that | means that the circuit board was slightly fried there. But the drive | now works. | | I don't know if the TVS ever protects without sacrificing itself. I | imagine that it does. So I should probably rescue the data and treat | the drive as junk / unreliable. | | Since the power supply warranty is only 3 years, I probably cannot get | anything from Antec. Since the power supply killed the disk drive | (and I did an operation on the drive), I don't see the drive being | covered by the Seagate warranty (the drive was purchased on the last | week that Seagate offered 5 year warranties on OEM drives). | | But I'm mad. I think that Antec should have recalled the power supply | when they knew of the bad capacitor problem. (I haven't broken the | PS's seal so I'm not sure that this is a bad cap problem.) Time for a | class action suit. But I'm lazy. | | Anybody had experience with hidden warranties from Antec?