Hard drive causing machine not to boot (shorting)

A

AARGH!

Gawd
Joined
Jun 13, 2003
Messages
766
My mother-in-law's PC got dropped off for me to diagnose the other day. It would just power up for a second then shut off when you tried to turn it on. So I started by testing the power supply with my cheapo tester and it checked out ok. Then proceeded to disconnect everything and see if it would boot up ok with just motherboard, and go from there. So eventually find out it's her hard drive that's preventing the power up.

So next step is to hook the drive up to my Acorn drive reader and see what happens. Lo and behold it comes right up, and I proceed to scan and back it up, just in case. That was last night, haven't tried puting it back in to see if it was just some fluke or what yet, but before I go buy her a new replacement drive what's the chances of it being something else. I tried different power connecter (it's a SATA drive and it was previously plugged into your standard molex via an adapter, removed it and plugged in SATA power cable).

Powers up just fine with everything else attached, it's a 350W power supply and it's not a power hungry PC by any means.

Just looking for any suggestions before I plug $$$ for a new hard drive for it.

Thanks,
 
So you tried a different drive and it all worked fine? if so, then it's the drive.

If it still does not boot or run, check for shorts somewhere.
 
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