Power supply or mobo?

[SticKx911]

My htpc is giving me some issues, and of course it's not at the best of times.

It has issues coming up from sleep. It lights up but no display. Sometimes plugging in the external hard drive causes a hard reset. Sometimes it freezes while accessing the system.

So I'm thinking either dead board or psu however I really can't afford both right now. Which would you suspect?

It's a 2500k system so it's far from new. I will put up the specs in a bit. I don't remember the exact models off hand, but the girlfriend is getting angry so I figured I would ask for a second opinion before investing money or time in it.

 

[michalrz]

What kind of sleep? Hibernation or powered-on sleep?
What do you mean by 'accesing the system'? Starting up?

What PSU are you currently running? Judging by the hard drive reboot - PSU. Judging by freezes at start up and waking up can also be a sign of a hard drive going bad.
It's quite unlikely you have two simultaneous problems - so I'm betting the PSU. I'd begin by simply reseating all the PSU cables - the motherboard plug, the hard drive connectors. Just related to power.

 

[SticKx911]

S3. So powered sleep.

Accessing system as in using file Explorer, Also often related to the external drive, but I use that drive for 95% of the htpc data so I don't know how correlated that particular drive is. Sorry that was super vague.

 

[sinisterDei]

I can't speak for everyone, but Sleep mode - for systems I've custom built - has been a perpetual source of oddball issues. Any factory assembled system (laptops, primarily) never seem to have problems with it, but many custom assembled systems do.

For example, my HTPC will often do the same as yours- it'll turn on to a blank screen. I think this is because it goes to sleep with Kodi in fullscreen mode, as often if I press the Windows key on the keyboard to get back to the desktop the display will 'wake up'. Additionally, about 1 in 10 times the USB receiver for the keyboard fails to work on resumption from sleep mode, which is ridiculous because the way I wake the system up from sleep is by tapping a key on the keyboard. I can typically just unplug and replug the little USB receiver and voila, it works. Sometimes, both things happen at the same time, so the display is blank and the keyboard isn't working; reseat the USB receiver and tap the Windows key and voila, it's alive.

The moral of the story for me is, if the only problems your PC has are related to coming out of sleep mode, then just avoid sleep mode. Either set it to shut down after a period of inactivity or leave it on all the time. Or learn to live with the side effects, as I have.

Now then, you're talking about other issues too, like freezing on plugging in an external HDD and "freezes when accessing the system" - could you clarify a bit on the last one at least? Just browsing around it'll stop mid-browse, or is it when attempting to open up Explorer for the first time that it freezes, and if you manage to make it into Explorer it's good until the next time you roll the dice?

If Explorer freezes when you open it up or when accessing the USB drive, and the USB drive is plugged in when the system is asleep, you may have isolated your problem in general. Maybe try a new USB enclosure, or just go without the external drive attached for a while and see if the problems subside.

 

[SticKx911]

Yes. Accessing system was alluding to file browsing. 90% or more of this system requires that drive. (all my movies and shows are on it) so I can't completely say it's the drives fault. The plug in issue I guessed was a 5v issue.

I have had sleep issues on many builds before but this guy had worked as expected for at least 2 years prior so an upswing in problems worries me of an eminent failure.

 

[sinisterDei]

Could you bypass the external enclosure for a time - is the disk inside it removable? You could temporarily (permanently?) install the disk inside the HTPC and see if not using the external enclosure fixes the issue.

You run your HTPC different than mine; mine streams all its media over the network, and it's all stored on my 'server' PC.