Weird Issue with Power Supply

A couple days ago we had a power surge at my house. The lights flickered off for a fraction of a second, which caused most of the TVs and computers in the house to restart.

When my computer rebooted, it gave me a "No OS found" message. Long story short, it turns out the OS drive was not receiving any power from the connector. Oddly enough, the other hard drive that shared the same line on a different connector worked just fine, as did every other component in the system. Running a different connector to the drive was going to be a real pain, so I left for about an hour to run some chores first. When and came back I tried the connector again just the heck of it and suddenly it started working again.

So my question is, why did it suddenly start working again? Could the power surge have caused the connector to somehow come loose (a bit scary that thought)? Should I be worried that my PS might no longer be trustworthy?

Edit: BTW, the Power supply is an Antec Earthwatts 650

I don't think a power surge can physically move a power connector. I would guess there was something else going on there. As long as everything is working well now I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's always wise to turn off your power supply before changing power connections.

timta2 said:

I don't think a power surge can physically move a power connector. I would guess there was something else going on there. As long as everything is working well now I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's always wise to turn off your power supply before changing power connections.

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Still no issues whatsoever since it started working again. I guess I'll file it under "Unexplained Mystery" for now

I assume your computer was off, and you pulled the connector out and plugged it back in, and then it was working again?

Possibly an unnoticed vibration caused a marginal connection to loosen up, that was rectified by reinserting the plug. It does seem like an extremely unlikely occurrance though.

Tsumi said:

I assume your computer was off, and you pulled the connector out and plugged it back in, and then it was working again?

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After the BIOS reported it could not find the boot drive, I pulled the computer out and unplugged it, checked the connections, plugged it back in, and still got the same BIOS error message. I repeated this a few times (re-seating the power connector, trying different SATA ports, etc..), but to no avail, same BIOS error. Everything else in the system spun up fine except the boot drive. I then pulled the boot drive, connected it to another computer and could access it just fine, so that led me to suspect the power connector to the boot drive in my system was the culprit.

I had the computer sitting out (unplugged) to get ready to start rerouting some wires to get access to a different power connector for the boot drive but had to leave for about an hour first. When I came back, I decided to power it up again one last time for the heck of it and lo and behold, it miraculously booted up just fine using the exact same power connector that wasn't working previously.

Probably a marginal wire connection that somehow got connected on your last attempt. That's the only thing I can think of.