Odd power button problem

[Xee]

Got a quick question about an odd problem (at least I've never heard of it before).

Recently, my brother wanted me to upgrade his primary HD in his 6 year-old Dell from a 120g to 320g drive. It arrived to day so I cloned his old primary drive to the new one and then took it out. After I had corrected the jumper setting so the comp would boot from the new drive, I pressed the power button . . . nothing happened.

I opened up the computer, checked all the connections, closed it up, and pressed the power button again. Still nothing. Being that it was late and I hadn't eaten anything in quite a few hours, I got frustrated and started jabbing the power button. Again, nothing. Then I held down the button . . . lo and behold, after 6 seconds or so, the computer began booting up. As soon as it did I shut it down again and tried pressing the power button. Nothing. I held down the button and after the same amount of time as before, it turned on.

Anyone have any clues why this is so?

 

[BillParrish]

in the bios of most computers, (dont mess with dell so have no idea) there is an option to have the power button work two ways.

1) instant off and on
2) 4 sec or longer delay when powering off, I guess to make sure any caches in memory or hard drive are saved instead of just killing the machine immedately.

This also (i think) has something to do with suspend (power saving ) modes in the bios settings. I dont use those settings except for the delay on power off so cant talk about em.

anyway, its kinda normal, I would just ignore it and just get used to holding in the power button to boot it up, to turn it off - windows should do that anyway.

You could download the manual and check the bios settings section to confirm my suspicions.

 

[Rotten_Necro]

he said after 6 seconds it started BOOTING UP, so something screwy is going on. I have no idea. Check the bios settings tbh, dunno what it cud be

 

[alphanumeric]

The 4 sec delay setting only affects turning off the PC. Any PC that I have worked on was instant on requardless of that setting. I would go over all your connections again. Something, must have got knocked loose when you removed the old drive. Re-seat any add-in cards in case they came part way out. If you do this and it still won't post put the original drive back in and try it again. Did you take precautions to avoid static discharg?

 

[BinarySynapse]

Also did you ask if this is normal behavior for his system. By normal I mena, has it always done that since he's owned it? Sorry if I missed that part if you already answered it.

 

[Xee]

Well, this saga took yet another odd twist.

Today, when my brother tried to turn on the computer, it came on with a single press of the button . . . and took him right to a screen that said "A Disk Read Error Occurred. Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart." He again called me into the room and I did a ctrl+alt+del which only served to show the Dell flash screen for a second and then the same disk read error again. I then tried to shut down the computer and it ended up taking me several attempts to do so.

I took apart the computer, reseated all the connections and put it back together again. Though when I started it up I got the same disk read error again. On a hunch, I took it apart again, removed the new Seagate and installed his old HD back in. As soon as I plugged the computer back in it immediately came on and booted up normally.

Obviously, this led me to believe that the Seagate drive was fried. On a whim though, I thought I'd take a shot at verifying that. When we had purchased this drive, we also bought another just like it along with an enclosure. I installed it into the enclosure and plugged it in to a USB port on his computer. It came up right away, showing everything we had cloned on to it from the original hard drive.

Now what does all this mean? I have no clue. The only thing that I can think of is that I heard that the Seagate drive, being of "perpendicular recording" variety, wasn't able to work correctly vertically. The spare bay I had in the in the computer required it to be installed upside down, so that may have led to the errors.

*shrug* Who really knows.