CD and DVD drives not powering up - PSU problem? 1

[bankboysb]

Yesterday everything working fine. Today, both my CD/DVD drives will not power on! The machine boots and runs Windows just fine. The floppy drive and the hard drives all get power and work perfectly. The CDR and the DVD-RW do not get any power. I swapped in a different CDR drive to check, but got no power.

Is it possible for the power supply to lose one voltage and maintain the other in good shape? I don't remember clearly, but I believe these drives require both voltages to operate. **BUT** so do the hard drives, and they are working fine!

Don't get it...any ideas out there?

 

[garebo]

check device mgr and report back - see if dev mgr shows "ide controllers" and both primary and secondary there.



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[franklin97355]

garebo's probably right but if you go inside the machine again you might try swapping the power cable from one of the working devices to one of the non-working ones and see what happens.

 

[garebo]

Can you give us the configuration you are working with.
like this:
c: main hard drive - primary - master
d: cdrom - primary - slave
e: dvd burner - seconday - master
f: ?

and so on, but state your configuration you have or had before the problem started.
thanks


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[garebo]

To franklin

That was my next step, lol.
Thats why i asked about the configuration.

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[bankboysb]

Well guys, thanks for the interest. I tried posting this earlier this week but the server crapped out on me. Anyway, here's how it got fixed.

Disconnected both drives and put a multimeter on all the leads; got consistent power from all leads and machine was still booting and running. Shut down and reconnected the DVD drive -- no problem. Measured the voltages again, all OK.

Shut down and reconnected the CDR; BANG! Now the machine wouldn't even start. Disconnected the CDR and restarted, but now the power supply was down - or at least it appeared that way based on the fact the machine would no longer power up at all.

Replaced the PSU and the CDR; everything was OK.
Conclusion: the CDR must have a short which caused a failure in the PSU after so many retries. Oh well, no big deal. Fortunately I have at least one spare for every component in my machine at the ready.

 

[garebo]

Your ps may be ok, sometimes you only have to re-set it again and it will work.
I use a "power supply tester" Its a little unit that plugs into the 20 pin main power supply connector. It re-sets the power supply and makes it run as long as its still good.
You can buy it online or at best buy or compusa for about $10.

You can do the same without it but i dont know the exact details. I saw it posted here a few days ago.

Something like connecting the power supply to the mobo and turning it off at the back and then unplugging from the wall, something along those lines, maybe i can find it here and report back or the person who wrote it will see this.
Like i said, i have the tester to do the same job.

This will probably put your old power supply back in business, at least as a backup anyway! Or a tester unit



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