AX1200 just destroyed 3 SSDs, 1 HDD, life?

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RageVI

Weaksauce
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Nov 23, 2006
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Maybe this should go in data storage. I don't know. I can't see straight right now.

I was swapping out my HX1000 for an AX1200. I connected the basic essentials (mobo, cpu, gpu) to make sure everything was good so far. Check.

I then hook up everything else, flip the switch, and turn the computer on again. I immediately hear some electric crackling/popping sounds and immediately kill the power. I don't see anything wrong with the connections I made. I've done this a million times, but all of my storage is gone. Everything else is fine. One of the SSDs was pretty hot for some reason (Although all three were on the same cord).

I could care less that $700-800 worth of equipment is gone (But that sucks ass in itself). I'm graduating soon with two bachelor's degrees in Computer Science, Digital Art and now have nearly nothing to show for what I've done in the past five years. I was literally in a tiny moment of vulnerability in changing how I back everything up (Have 2 x 2TB drives in the mail that arrive tomorrow, even).

Any idea what happened? Is there anything Corsair can do for me at all?

As for the data, the SSDs were in RAID 0 and the HDD backed them up. I'm assuming the SSDs are long gone. Was maybe just the controller board on the HDD fried and the data is still intact on the platters? Would it be possible to replace said board to recover the data, perhaps?

Also, does anyone know a good way to tie a noose? (Joking, not going to kill myself, don't call the cops)
 
Same thing happened to me in college with an Enermax and a bunch of hard drives. Since then I have always separated my backups from my active system.

Anyway Corsair isn't liable at all. It's in the fine print when you bought it. Most you can do is get another power supply.

As for your data the SSD is probably fried for good, but your hard drive should be OK. Maybe the circuit board just got fried. I remember the drives I had blew some tantalum capacitor to pieces. You will have to get an exact match (model and firmware) for your hard drive for it to work. (This is apain in the ass for WD because they make 10 different firmware revisions per model all witht he same model name) Otherwise go for a data recovery service.
 
First does windows or the bios see the drives? If so I bet your data is still safe, just windows can't see the data. I use a program called getback data http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Its a bit pricey, but it has saved my @$$ several times. Good thing the trial is free and you can use it to see if your data is recoverable. If so, buy a license and recover your data on the spot.
 
Sounds like though your data is more important than the money. So if you can't revive them with the circuit board swap use a real data recovery service instead of trying some recovery program that could possibly fuck up things even more.

The worse thing to do after a hard drive failure is to try some unknown third party program. The more you access a broken disk the worse shape your data will be.
 
I think the main problem is that the controller board for the hard drive is fried. You might be in for some expensive data recovery on the platters themselves.

You might be able to swap the controller board with one from an identical hard drive but I know nothing about doing that. Considering that you only have one copy of the data left I would proceed with extreme caution.
 
BIOS doesn't see any drives (The Intel RAID controller and the JMicron controller that the HDD was connected to don't see anything), so of course I can't boot in to Windows.

Guess I'll have to start looking for another WD Caviar Blue.

Maybe I can gut one of the X25-Ms ... maybe it can at least hold business cards. Fuck.
 
That sucks. Did you use the cables included with the AX1200 or did you try to use some of the older HX1000 cables?

Either way, send me an email at [email protected] and I'll see what I can do for you.
 
worrisome as my new ax1200 is coming in tomorrow to replace an hx1000.

But yeah, as redbeard asked, did you use some of the hx1000 cables?
 
Redbeard said:
That sucks. Did you use the cables included with the AX1200 or did you try to use some of the older HX1000 cables?

Either way, send me an email at [email protected] and I'll see what I can do for you.
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I used the cables that came with the AX1200. Since the HX1000 was only semi-modular, I had to disconnect most of the cables anyway, so I just did them all.

Thanks for offering your support. I'll shoot you an email.
 
Geez that sucks. Sorry that happened to you. Have you tried looking on ebay to see if you can find PCBs that match your hard drive?

I would also try emailing support at Intel. If you can't get anywhere let me know and I can put some feelers out at work tomorrow (I'm an engineer at Intel). I don't know if I'll be able to help you but I can try.
 
Vengance_01 said:
First does windows or the bios see the drives? If so I bet your data is still safe, just windows can't see the data. I use a program called getback data http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Its a bit pricey, but it has saved my @$$ several times. Good thing the trial is free and you can use it to see if your data is recoverable. If so, buy a license and recover your data on the spot.
Click to expand...

This is an extremely bad idea when dealing with a drive that has any kind of failure on it. a much safer approach on drives that are failing that are detected is to use a imaging program (ddrescue is amazing for this!) to image the drive onto a new drive before you run any data recovery programs on it. If the drive is physically failing and you try to run a data recovery program on it, you will most likely make the drive fail (I work in a tech shop and we do lots of data recovery this way)
 
I have 3 WD Caviar Blue 640GBs of differing ages. Get me some serial numbers or other identifying info and I'll try to see if one of my drives would be a valid donor for the board you're needing. If it is and you're willing to ship me your drive I'll do the recovery here for a reasonable fee (I've done this sort of thing before). If not, due to security concerns or what have you, I'd be willing to sell you the drive you need for a reasonable price. Send me a PM, OP.
 
RageVI said:
As for the data, the SSDs were in RAID 0 and the HDD backed them up. I'm assuming the SSDs are long gone. Was maybe just the controller board on the HDD fried and the data is still intact on the platters? Would it be possible to replace said board to recover the data, perhaps?
Click to expand...

I just recently dodged a bullet myself, so this isn't meant as rubbing it in, but...

A back-up plan is not a good one if a single incident of failure can wipe out your primary data and all back-ups of it all at once.

This month alone (thanks to stopping bothering to burn to DVD since HDs are so darn cheap now) I've lost almost 3TB of data due to a failed HD (turned it off, moved the computer three feet, HD never turned back on again...) and a failed array that I can probably still salvage if I want to use $100 software on it and reconstruct it... (It's just stuff I can re-download off of the 'net, so I'm almost positive I won't bother...)

But, I went through the seven stages of grief for an hour when I lost that array, as it was a boot partition on a machine, and over a year's worth of data on it... I was switching video cards, then changing my back-up routine on it when this happened, which is why I lost data...

But the important data on it... while my last good back-up was two weeks old (got lazy, this typically should have been almost daily), it only took less than an hour to take old data files and update them with the two weeks' of missing data...

But while was my last good back-up was two weeks ago, I still had about four different sources of a back-up of that data... Only a tornado or fire concerns me...


So, hard lesson to learn, but I doubt you'll ever let this happen to you again anyway...

But yeah, if you're switching around untested hardware, don't have all of your eggs in that basket first time you flip the switch...
 
FWIW, anytime I'm replacing a power supply or power cable for a device, whether it's a cell phone or a computer, I stick a multimeter to it across every possible connection to verify it's solid. I've dodged at least two bullets on unstable power supplies that way (e.g. 4.45~4.85V variance on the 5V rail across fixed clips.) (Then I forgot it was bad and donated it to build a low-cost common area computer - fried ~$150 in leftover parts in a puff of acrid smoke).
 
I have 2vertex in amd raid0, a few days ago i get the bcd error(can't boot) so i go crazy trying to figure it out, i then just switched from booting from raid to finding an old hd in the drawer, sticking that in putting win7 on it quickly and booted from that. I could then install the amd raid drivers and i saw my drive, then used easybcd to fix the bcd.
(i read you can fix bcd from using the recovery cd, but i could never get it work w/ my raid0 for some reason)

so maybe you can try this roundabout way first.
 
Sorry about your troubles.

Someone needs to come up with fast acting current limiting devices to protect loads on these huge single rail PSU's and I am not sure even then they could react quick enough.
 
MrDudeMan said:
Geez that sucks. Sorry that happened to you. Have you tried looking on ebay to see if you can find PCBs that match your hard drive?

I would also try emailing support at Intel. If you can't get anywhere let me know and I can put some feelers out at work tomorrow (I'm an engineer at Intel). I don't know if I'll be able to help you but I can try.
Click to expand...

I went ahead and e-mailed Intel to see what my prospects of functionality/data recovery are. I'll post any updates I have here. Thanks for looking out for me!

silent-circuit said:
I have 3 WD Caviar Blue 640GBs of differing ages. Get me some serial numbers or other identifying info and I'll try to see if one of my drives would be a valid donor for the board you're needing. If it is and you're willing to ship me your drive I'll do the recovery here for a reasonable fee (I've done this sort of thing before). If not, due to security concerns or what have you, I'd be willing to sell you the drive you need for a reasonable price. Send me a PM, OP.
Click to expand...

I may be interested in purchasing one of your drives. I'll take a look at my HDD's specific specs and may contact you shortly. Thank you!

PAo_ReVoLT said:
sound to me that you forget to change the modular cable for the HDD
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God I hope that's not the case. I made sure to remove the cables and use the included ones since I've heard that problems could happen from mixing and matching them. Would anyone be able to confirm if this would be an issue between HX1000 and AX1200 cables?
 
I believe I saw Redbeard state on the Jonnyguru forums that the modular cables in HX1000 are NOT compatible with the modular cables in the AX1200 , due to different pinouts. I believe the AX1200 cables are labeled "AX1200" or something similar. This is all based off of what I saw maybe last week, but I am certain that modular cables have no standard pinouts at all, meaning that the cables may not be the same even within the same distributor (if they source the cables from different manufacturers).

Found it, post #56 http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6874&page=6
 
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skruideli said:
I believe I saw Redbeard state on the Jonnyguru forums that the modular cables in HX1000 are NOT compatible with the modular cables in the AX1200 , due to different pinouts. I believe the AX1200 cables are labeled "AX1200" or something similar. This is all based off of what I saw maybe last week, but I am certain that modular cables have no standard pinouts at all, meaning that the cables may not be the same even within the same distributor (if they source the cables from different manufacturers).

Found it, post #56 http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6874&page=6
Click to expand...

They should also be mechanically incompatible so they can't physically be plugged into each other without forcing the hell out of it.
 
Redbeard said:
They should also be mechanically incompatible so they can't physically be plugged into each other without forcing the hell out of it.
Click to expand...

You know what? I'm really starting to doubt myself. I was never 100% aware of the problems that could happen from this sort of thing. I always thought that the cables had the same pinout/standards, but you'd want to use the cables that came with the PSU in case there were minor cosmetic/physical discrepancies, and I would do so as a sort of "good practice" thing. Because of this, I was admittedly NOT very careful when replacing the cables, and had both HX1000 and AX1200 cables laying around on the floor.

One of the cables did require a little more oomph to push in (It would go in 2/3rds of the way and was stubborn for the rest) and I didn't give it any second thought. I read your post on the johnnyguru forums that said you print "AX1200" on the cables themselves. I may be crazy, but I don't see any labeling on any of the cables. What's also weird is that on the pictures of every review I can find of the AX1200, the back says "Use approved AX1200 cables only" (as on here), but this notice is absent on my unit. I'm not trying to assign any blame when I mention that, but I definitely would've been a lot more careful if I saw it :( Everything's dismantled now and I don't have a way to see if that's the case for sure.
 
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Upon first reading this thread I figured it was user error as in all the years of dealing with computers have I ever found a NIB power supply just "frying out" everything in the system it was installed in. ALL power supply units are functional tested before shipping. Not saying things can come loose during shipping and DOAs or short-lived units don't happen, but to flat out short-out devices like that means there is usually a wiring issue (as in a short somewhere, a molex connector pin on a protusion, etc)...

I am just glad the OP was "man enough" to admit his wrong doing and we can putthis to rest as a "user error" circumstance, not a "bad product" one.

I have the AX1200 as well and all the connectors snapped in just fine (some wouldn't clip the retaining clips without some pressure once it was together, but all the cable connectors slipped together without any force at all)...

The biggest concern here was a possible bad-manufactured cable that had some pins out of place. If that is true it is a QC problem.

To the OP, as a "rule of thumb" on anything in life, don't make generalized assumptions about ANYTHING unless you have verified the facts. I would never imagine that anything that does not have a "standard" applied to it (such as modular connections on power supplies) would ever have one thing be consistent between brands or even between models by the same manufacturer. You can ALWAYS assume that if you use what is provided with a product ONLY with that product will it work as expected.
 
Wow, I just have to comment, 1st, hats off to the guy who admitted he may have mad a mistake. Not easy to do in front of people. 2nd, the Corsair guy for being real stand up and saying he will see what he can do. It's threads like this that I really enjoy reading. People trying to help people. Most of the time, it's epeens and bashing.

At any rate, hope things work out.

I just ordered a Corsair Professional AX850 for my new build. I bought it due to the fact the reviews have been very high. That's another thing I have to comment on, Corsair for going out of their way to bring quality to the table on this new AX brand. I'm reading reviews where the reviewers are saying they've NEVER seen this type of quality in a PSU before. Over reacting or not, I'm excited.

I will say one thing, and trust me, I'm laughing with you .... not at you. I will be extra careful not to force any connections tomorrow.

Oh, I also picked up a Corsair Force 120 SSD .... God I am so excited.

Sadly, I bought a H70 Water Cooling System off e-crater for $89 shipped free and looks like I was ripped off. No email response and the people / persons are long gone. That stings like crazy. Mostly cause I don't have any extra money, for a long long while to replace it.

My new build is about 80% Corsair. It's gonna be SICK.

Ohh, and also 8gig of Corsair CMX4GX3M2A2000C9 DD3 2000mhz modules.
 
RageVI said:
You know what? I'm really starting to doubt myself. I was never 100% aware of the problems that could happen from this sort of thing. I always thought that the cables had the same pinout/standards, but you'd want to use the cables that came with the PSU in case there were minor cosmetic/physical discrepancies, and I would do so as a sort of "good practice" thing. Because of this, I was admittedly NOT very careful when replacing the cables, and had both HX1000 and AX1200 cables laying around on the floor.

One of the cables did require a little more oomph to push in (It would go in 2/3rds of the way and was stubborn for the rest) and I didn't give it any second thought. I read your post on the johnnyguru forums that said you print "AX1200" on the cables themselves. I may be crazy, but I don't see any labeling on any of the cables. What's also weird is that on the pictures of every review I can find of the AX1200, the back says "Use approved AX1200 cables only" (as on here), but this notice is absent on my unit. I'm not trying to assign any blame when I mention that, but I definitely would've been a lot more careful if I saw it :( Everything's dismantled now and I don't have a way to see if that's the case for sure.
Click to expand...

For what it's worth I have an AX1200 that I installed last week. The vinyl bag with the cables I didn't use is still in my computer room. I just pulled two out at random, one is a SATA cable with two SATA plugs, the other is a PCI-E cable. Both on the end that goes into the PSU say "AX1200 ONLY". Without opening up my PC case to confirm this, it looks like said label would be completly in the plug in the PSU if the cable was inserted, one can only read the label on the plug if it's not plugged into the PSU.

I hope this doesn't sound like I'm rubbing it in, that's not my intent at all. I guess I'm hoping this somehow helps even if it possibly hightlights your mistake, if you did use your HX1000 cables with your AX1200.
 
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The cable thing DOES bother me greatly. I would probably fall into the same trap as the OP. I think most of us, who have spent 20+ years with PC, have come recognize the connectors that we use are based upon a standard. The PC world has been really good about this even to the point of color coding things. It basically took the "scary" out of PC building and usage. However, when a vendor puts out two different cables with the same exact connections (this is not the norm for the PC industry).

If bought the HX1000 and the AX1200 and look at the back...I don't think I would assume there is any difference

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/coolers/corsair-psu-roundup/hx1000-back.jpg

http://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2010/06/20144546898l.jpg

Even if I look at the cables...I don't see any HUGE difference

http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/skymtl/PSU_review/HX1000W/LARGE/HX1000W-22.jpg

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:...30102/Corsair AX1200 PSU/pciecables-4.jpg&t=1

I think i'm gong to put a bit of blame on the manufacturer on this one as well. This mistakes is TOO easy to make with massive ramifications. I also seeing this happening more since people tend to follow the same manufacturer from supply to supply. My guess with the amount of posts here about people going form the HX to the AX...the OP was just the FIRST unfortunate person...but it would have happened.

To me...this is no different than if Intel made a two different CPU's with similar names using the same socket but different pinouts which would cause damage.

To me, the word "approved" only means "rated" when it comes to PC hardware, not different wiring. Sorry like saying "only use genuine mobil oil" for your car.

I think corsair needs to make a MUCH bigger deal out this for their customers. If this means big red pieces of paper and tags...then do it.
 
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SixFootDuo said:
Wow, I just have to comment, 1st, hats off to the guy who admitted he may have mad a mistake. Not easy to do in front of people. 2nd, the Corsair guy for being real stand up and saying he will see what he can do. It's threads like this that I really enjoy reading. People trying to help people. Most of the time, it's epeens and bashing.

At any rate, hope things work out.

I just ordered a Corsair Professional AX850 for my new build. I bought it due to the fact the reviews have been very high. That's another thing I have to comment on, Corsair for going out of their way to bring quality to the table on this new AX brand. I'm reading reviews where the reviewers are saying they've NEVER seen this type of quality in a PSU before. Over reacting or not, I'm excited.

I will say one thing, and trust me, I'm laughing with you .... not at you. I will be extra careful not to force any connections tomorrow.

Oh, I also picked up a Corsair Force 120 SSD .... God I am so excited.

Sadly, I bought a H70 Water Cooling System off e-crater for $89 shipped free and looks like I was ripped off. No email response and the people / persons are long gone. That stings like crazy. Mostly cause I don't have any extra money, for a long long while to replace it.

My new build is about 80% Corsair. It's gonna be SICK.

Ohh, and also 8gig of Corsair CMX4GX3M2A2000C9 DD3 2000mhz modules.
Click to expand...

Yeah never by from ecrater. I bought a DS game off of there and had to wait 3 weeks to get my money back from paypal :(
 
OP your problem did look like having used the wrong cable. My friend had fried his disk array because the PSU had an OPPOSITE pinout on peripherals, that is, +12V is fed on the +5V pin, frying all the chips on board.

Having said that, Corsair is partly responsible for this issue. Just look at the connectors. The HX1000 and AX1200 both used 2x3 molex type connector for HDD/SATA modular interface. There is a mechanical lock design, but the difference is only ONE PIN, that is the upper-right pin on HX1000's connector, and the lower-right pin on AX1200's connector. Why didn't Corsair ask Flextronics to make it pin-compatible with HX1000 on 6pin peripheral, and pin-compatible with AX850/750 on 24pin modular interface? Technically those aren't a problem. Why just had them free with their decision and left the problem to the customers? I don't understand.
 
Trepidati0n said:
If bought the HX1000 and the AX1200 and look at the back...I don't think I would assume there is any difference

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/coolers/corsair-psu-roundup/hx1000-back.jpg

http://www.overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2010/06/20144546898l.jpg

Even if I look at the cables...I don't see any HUGE difference

http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/skymtl/PSU_review/HX1000W/LARGE/HX1000W-22.jpg

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:...30102/Corsair AX1200 PSU/pciecables-4.jpg&t=1

I think i'm gong to put a bit of blame on the manufacturer on this one as well. This mistakes is TOO easy to make with massive ramifications. .
Click to expand...


20144546898l.jpg


Sorry, but if you put it in the wrong hole your blind.....you got 8 pin and 6 pin and then the 10 and 14 pin...it can only go in one way and if you put a 6 pin cable into a 8 hole plug, your blind again or simply not paying attention.

What has me is no backup in 5 years? even if your JUST changing your backup system, in 5 years you never once burned a DVD or used a flash drive to back things up? It suck you lost this and i really really hope they can help you out, that would be upstanding for Intel to hook you up and help you out!
 
MrGuvernment said:
20144546898l.jpg


Sorry, but if you put it in the wrong hole your blind.....you got 8 pin and 6 pin and then the 10 and 14 pin...it can only go in one way and if you put a 6 pin cable into a 8 hole plug, your blind again or simply not paying attention.

What has me is no backup in 5 years? even if your JUST changing your backup system, in 5 years you never once burned a DVD or used a flash drive to back things up? It suck you lost this and i really really hope they can help you out, that would be upstanding for Intel to hook you up and help you out!
Click to expand...

TravisCHEN said:
OP your problem did look like having used the wrong cable. My friend had fried his disk array because the PSU had an OPPOSITE pinout on peripherals, that is, +12V is fed on the +5V pin, frying all the chips on board.

Having said that, Corsair is partly responsible for this issue. Just look at the connectors. The HX1000 and AX1200 both used 2x3 molex type connector for HDD/SATA modular interface. There is a mechanical lock design, but the difference is only ONE PIN, that is the upper-right pin on HX1000's connector, and the lower-right pin on AX1200's connector. Why didn't Corsair ask Flextronics to make it pin-compatible with HX1000 on 6pin peripheral, and pin-compatible with AX850/750 on 24pin modular interface? Technically those aren't a problem. Why just had them free with their decision and left the problem to the customers? I don't understand.
Click to expand...


It sounds like this is the most likely culprit, that the cables you used from the other PSU had a different pinout than the cables that were supposed to go with that powersupply. Different pin-out = blue smoke :(
 
MrGuvernment said:
Sorry, but if you put it in the wrong hole your blind.....you got 8 pin and 6 pin and then the 10 and 14 pin...it can only go in one way and if you put a 6 pin cable into a 8 hole plug, your blind again or simply not paying attention.
Click to expand...
The problem isn't putting cables into the wrong holes, it's using cables from a different power supply which have the same connectors on the end but different pinouts. They are physically compatible, but not electrically compatible.
 
Zero82z said:
The problem isn't putting cables into the wrong holes, it's using cables from a different power supply which have the same connectors on the end but different pinouts. They are physically compatible, but not electrically compatible.
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They are not physically compatible, a square and rounded connector segment are swapped from what I can tell. It would take some serious muscle to force one in.
 
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