PC Problem / Power Supply Question

Life Technology
1

Got a PC at the office that is making trouble. We use it as a pseudo-server, i.e. it’s a network client running on Windows 2000 Pro with two harddiscs for file sharing purposes / backup storage.

Recently the thing doesn’t start (monitor doesn’t even detect any signal), sometimes it does reset itself and often it hangs even nobody is touching it - reset via CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn’t work then, I need to pull the plug (literally).
I can manage to get it working for a while but it’s not bearable in the long term. I noticed the following:

  1. Once in the while the BIOS beeps twice and indicating a problem with the drives (I checked the code)
  2. Often the CD-ROM or floppy drive lights lit up with no disc inside
  3. Windows did crash once with a Blue-Screen indicating a problem with the ATAPI.SYS driver

This all seems to be pointing to a drive problem, but I can’t narrow it down.
I disconnected the power from the CD-ROM and floppy but it still makes trouble after a couple of hours.

So firstly I would like to know if a 200Watt power supply is sufficient for 1 CD-ROM, 1 floppy, 1 harddisk, 1 graphics adapter and 1 LAN card.

Secondly, if the power supply is sufficient - what do you recommend next? Re-install Windows?

Any advise appreciated.

2

Either way backup all your data now.

Virus be my first guess. Heat would be the next. But if those 2 aren’t the cause…

200Watt PS should be enough. Though it really depends on your CPU. AMD Athlons XP+s I usually throw at 250 minimum 300 is better.

If not the PS, then maybe it’s the drive itself. Might need to replace it. In that case you’re just fubar.

Either way, PS or HD problem…

  1. Get a copy of Norton’s Ghost.
  2. Reload your system partition
  3. Ghost the system partition (copy)
    In case you have to reload your system again, save you the hassle of reloading everything. Only takes about 30min to reload your system partition and you don’t even have to be paying attention.
3

[color=indigo]It’s not really enough to classify a power supply as 200W or 300W. It’s more like 3 independant PSUs at 3.3V, 5V and 12V, different parts of the computer needing different voltages. The newer CPU’s use only the 12V line, taking up to 10A, Hard discs use about 2A of 12V. The motherboard and cards tend to use the other 2 lines. So if your PSU supplies 10A at 12V, you’ll have problems.

It all depends on what processor, and what the PSU supplies at all 3 voltages (especially 12V, cheaper PSUs can be feeble at 12V, but still claim a high ‘total’ output)

Also, the heavier the PSU, the better. Cheaper ones have little heatsinks and little capacitors.[/color]

4

I got similar problem before, might be the vga card getting old and acting up. I might be wrong. Try replace your vga card and restart the pc.

ax

5

I have far too much experience with these things. At a guess, your power supply is dying. The cheap ones die VERY FAST here with the humidity, heat, lack of grounding, and such, and they can lead to a huge array of problems. For whatevr reason, they seem to tell hardest on the pieces with moving parts - ie the hard drives and CD drives. I have several bum CD and hard drives, with such odd symptoms as:

System will not boot if CD drive is plugged in.
System crashes intermittently, especially if a CD is placed in the CD-ROM.
Works fine until you try to burn a CD, goes to end of disk, then as lead out starts the system crashes.

My best suggestion is to buy a good new power supply, and be warned that the health of your drives and cd drives may have been permanently harmed. As was stated, now is a very good time to start backing up.

6

Power supplies are so cheap that getting a 350 or 400 W unit just for giggles is a real possibility, yes?

Is the mobo inside the PC listed as WHQL compatible? It might just be choking to death on W2K…

Also, you’re using said PC as a “server” essentially because it’s no longer useful as a client, yes? Hmm…

7

Check to see if the powerbar is filled to the max by other power cords. It may draw power away. Just a guess. Also, when you start your computer try and have the monitor shut off until you hear a beep. Atapi.sys… Try to install a current network card driver.

btw, are you running a celeron?

8

Thanks for the advise so far. I just found that the CD-ROM doesn’t open anymore (tray won’t come out if I press the “Eject” button) - strange. Guess that thing has to go anyway, will recommend to replace it with a DVD writer.

Yep, nobody is using it so we equipped it with a 2nd harddisk and converted it into a “server”.

It’s a PIII 933MHz - quite an old Compaq desktop PC.

9
10

I had a look inside the PC on Tuesday and noticed alot of dust around the main processor, so I took it apart, ripped out all the cables and cards and cleaned the whole thing (cough, cough - can you still see me?).
After that I assembled it back together and it started up without any problems and has been running since then with no problems.
Also managed to open the CD-ROM tray using the emergency eject button and a bit of force, at least it works on occasion.
Also found a Compaq diagnostic tool (it’s a Chinese OS, so it wasn’t that obvious to me) and it reported no problems.

Happy again and thanks again for the advise / help provided. :rainbow:

11

so it’s the dust…:slight_smile:
need regular maintenance I think…
oil it and put some jojoba too…

ax

12

[quote=“Rascal”]I had a look inside the PC on Tuesday and noticed alot of dust around the main processor, so I took it apart, ripped out all the cables and cards and cleaned the whole thing (cough, cough - can you still see me?).
After that I assembled it back together and it started up without any problems and has been running since then with no problems.
Also managed to open the CD-ROM tray using the emergency eject button and a bit of force, at least it works on occasion.
Also found a Compaq diagnostic tool (it’s a Chinese OS, so it wasn’t that obvious to me) and it reported no problems.

Happy again and thanks again for the advise / help provided. :rainbow:[/quote]

If cleaning the dust solved the problem, I would reason that the dust was causing overheating.

I’ve experienced overheating in the past during scorching summer days (I don’t have air-conditioning) even though I clean the insides of dust periodically. With my current machine, I’ve solved that problem by downclocking the cpu. On older machines you may have to set a jumper to do that, but on my (one-year old) current motherboard it’s just a BIOS setting. Downclocking from 1.4 Mhz to 1.2 Mhz dropped the temperature about 5 degrees Celsius.

cheers,
Robert

13

Sh…, the server just beeped two times and crashed with a blue screen. As before ATAPI.SYS was mentioned.
Guess it’s time to re-install windows and/or change the drive(s) …

14

What is the make of the hard drive?

Would it happen to be an IBM drive?

If so then that may be your culprit.

It is also possible that, in your cleaning endeavors , you happened to bump the drive into working for a little while longer. Drives can be funny that way.

If replacing, I’d suggest a Maxtor or Seagate.
Though I know that it does happen…either has yet to fail me.

15

As Nam mentioned, IBM (now Hitachi) disk drives had a big quality control problem in the IDE disk drives. The 45G and 60G models were particularly bad, though there’s been reports of problems with other capacities as well. I had a whole batch of 60G IBMs go out on me one after the other. It was really quite distressing.

Second, with regards to power supplies… PS makers regularly fudge the power ratings to the high end of their capacity. Thus a cheap-ass ‘200W’ power supply may not actually put out that much juice in real life, while a better built ‘200W’ power supply that is conservatively rated will probably put out much more than that without problem. In Taiwan, I like to get the Delta brand power supply. They have been rock solid for me, and only a few hundred NT more than an average one.

And finally, about heat… There’s a lot of factors here. Case design is pretty important. A badly designed case will not have the airflow to cool off all the components. The main things you need to cool are:

  1. CPU
  2. Hard Drives
  3. Memory
  4. Graphics Card (if it is a high-end model)
  5. Power Supply

If you have a cheap case you probably just have one fan in the power supply. Some newer power supplies have two. This may still not be enough if your components are putting out a lot of heat. If your case has space for extra fans, you can add on fans for about NT50-100 each. Depending on the model the fans connect either to the motherboard (make sure yours has free connector) or to the power supply via one of the disk power connectors. My case has three fans (in addition to the power supply, cpu and graphics board fans) to better cool it. Since you don’t have 6 hard drives in it like me, you probably will be happy with one extra fan. You might also want to confirm that the fans are actually working. They do fail sometimes.

I’d still be worried about your CD-ROM drive first though. Since you are crashing within the ATAPI.SYS driver, which controls the CD-ROM, and you are having trouble with the drive otherwise, it’s a good bet that it may be the source of your problems. Try just disconnecting the drive entirely and see if that helps.

Next, to see if it is heat, download a utility that lets you monitor your CPU temperature. Unfortunately these are motherboard specific. You should check if your motherboard maker has a utility you can download or if you have one on your install CDs. If not, try the program “motherboard monitor” at mbm.livewiredev.com/ It doesn’t work with all motherboards, but it may work on yours. If your CPU is always below 60C then you are probably not having heat problems. Between 60C to 70C may or may not be a problem depending on the CPU. Above 70C, you are usually frying things. If heat is a problem, try the following until it is solved: 1) extra case fans 2) better cpu fan 3) better designed case 4) extra heatsinks on the memory modules 5) even more fans.

If heat is not an issue, random crashes usually have to do with bad memory or a bad power supply or some other component that is flaky. The best way to diagnose is to swap parts in and out until the problem goes away. This isn’t easy if you don’t have a bunch of extra crap lying around like some people. If you have any geek friends they might be able to help out with diagnosis.

16

Tried that before (and disconnecting the floppy) but it still crashed.

The harddiscs are Seagate and Maxtor. We are currently backing them up to re-install Windoofs. Let’s see how it goes …

17

And here are the latest updates: swapped the CD-ROM drive with another PC but still had problems.
So we made a backup to a new harddisk, formatted the primary harddisk, re-installed Windows2000 Pro and … the 2nd harddisk containing our database and backups didn’t work anymore. It had to be send to a shop as something got corrupted.
Harddisk came back and worked. Until a few days later when the PC booted and showed a blue screen. So the 2nd harddisk was replaced with the backup harddisk.
Again it lastet for a few days and this morning another blue screen showed up (‘Kernel_Stack_Inpage_Error’). The message, coming from Windows I rekon, advised to disable shadowing and caching in the BIOS. Checked and found no such function.
Booted the PC / Windows and now it runs fine though I expect it to fail again.

Time to buy a new motherboard?

18

You might want to check with the motherboard maker to see if there is a BIOS update you can download and install. Another thing to try, although there may not be a shadowing option in the BIOS, try looking for a ‘reset to defaults’ option and try that. With all the disk and CDROM problems, next thing I’d suspect is the disk controller. It’s built in to the motherboard, but you can get a PCI plugin card for about NT800. On the otherhand, you might not want to invest in too many more bandaid solutions and just get a new motherboard.