lost drive with new PSU

Emmzi

While b/f is looking for new PC, I am spending the afternoon repairing mine with a new PSU. I'm liking 'intelligent cabling' -much more room to work with. However I am very inept at PCs generally and seem to have done something to knock out my 2nd hard drive (and CPU fan, but I think I can spot the loose wire on that one.. another 2 fans fitted so not panicking yet on that one.)

The primary HD is found, and everything running fine, but the second one (where I store games etc) has vanished...

So my question is, what wires should be going in to it? Just a power source and the gray data ribbon cable? Or am I missing something?

Please use small words, I need talked through in terms of 'the square four pronged thingy goes in..' etc!

Zahc

Does your second drive run up and have you set it up as a 'slave'? This is a small 2 pin jumper plug normally found on the end of the 'business end' of the hard drive.

albertross_2

yes just power and data ribbon, have you connected it with the same cables that came off, and are they seated in the motherboard correctly. Or mixed them up with DVD/Cd?

Can you feel it spinning/vibrating.

Is it set to auto recognise in the bios?

Emmzi

Zahc wrote:

Does your second drive run up and have you set it up as a 'slave'? This is a small 2 pin jumper plug normally found on the end of the 'business end' of the hard drive.

Not sure how I tell if it 'runs up'.. it was set as slave before changing psu... can I tell from bios? Am quite clueless...

Emmzi

albertross wrote:

yes just power and data ribbon, have you connected it with the same cables that came off, and are they seated in the motherboard correctly. Or mixed them up with DVD/Cd?

Can you feel it spinning/vibrating.

Is it set to auto recognise in the bios?

erm...taking laptop upstairs to check bios... and to fondle drives for vibration...

Zahc

Like albertross said, it should be whirring/vibrating. Watch out if you've got the computer running with the cover off; don't want you to get frazzled.

Emmzi

ok..everything is vibrating gently... emmzi not frazzled yet... not found in bios, which cables etc does it look like I need to examine?

Zahc

You should have both the primary and secondary hard drives connected to the primary IDE connector and ribbon. (This is assuming you have IDE hard drives).
The primary HD should be on the end of the ribbon and the secondary HD should be on the connector half way down the ribbon. Primary HD set to 'master'.

Emmzi

Thanks Zahc. Unfortunately it just died on me again..think my problem is worse than PSU..time for callout, sigh. Why does this always happen when I'm skint???

Zahc

Expand on 'it's just died on me'. And yes, it always happens when your skint. It does with me, but mainly because I'm always skint

Emmzi

Power just cut out. Had an engineer round 2 weeks ago, (hasn't been seen since,hence self installing his reccomended solution of new PSU)who diagnosed not CPU/ motherboard after running some kind of energy consumption test that produced pretty graphs. But sometimes it'll run for hours, sometimes die mid-application, and sometimes won't get as far as post-test beep.

It's had about £300 in repairs in the last 18 months. (inc motherboard and PSU which power surge took out- pre-my buying surge protector.) Might be time to call it a day on this one... it's going to need a new CPU fan too..and who knows what else...