| Author | Message | ||
     Garyl |
OK, I've got an old HP computer that hasn't run in 3 years. It died one day when I tried to turn it on, and smoke came out of the back of the tower near where the power cord plugs in. I bought a new PC when the old HewlettPacker smoked, but I held onto it because someone told me that it was probably just the "power supply" that fried and I had some good music files saved on it(back when napster was FREE!) and some family pictures in the "my documents" file. I planned on retrieving these files one day by replacing the power supply. Anyway, a close family member recently passed away, and I remember having photos of them on the old computer. So, two weeks ago I bought a new PSU(power supply unit) on EBAY, for the old HP in hopes of reviving it and recapturing the photos. The PSU arrived yesterday. I installed it with ease. There were a few "extra" 4-pin connectors on the new PSU, which I simply taped off with elec tape (I figured they were for extra hardware which mine does not have ie. floppy drive, double cd drives etc.) I plugged in the power cord & attached the monitor, keyboard, & mouse. I pushed the power button and it came to life. Within seconds, windows 98 was loading. Then the old familiar wallpaper from my desktop loaded. But, before my desktop icons appeared, a window popped up which said that explorer.exe had performed an illegal operation and must close. The desktop never fully loaded, and the PC did not shut down or do any thing after that. I had to shut it down by typing/pressing ctrl-alt-del and then clicking on "close windows" because the "start" button in the lower left hand corner never appeared. I re-booted it at least a dozen times and even tried to boot it in safe mode, but to no avail. Then, after about the 12th time of shutting it down, it refused to start back up! No smoke or anything spectacular this time, just a completely dead PC. No lights, sounds, or anything. I tried a diferent wall outlet and a different power cord, but no difference. Could the new power supply be faulty? How can you check them? Did I screw up by taping up the leftover connectors? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Gary | ||
| Iamike |
You can reinstall Windows to fix the probably corrupted file that is preventing the startup. That won't erase the other files as long as you don't format the c: drive. Or you can take it into a local PC shop and they can retrieve the stuff for you for a fee. | ||
| Garyl |
At this point, I cant reinstall anything! It wont turn on. . . . . . . . . Anyone know how to test the power supply with a DVOM? | ||
| Bdabuell |
i'd say at this point your quickest option would be to yank the hard drive and add it to the new PC as a slave - that way your new PC can read the files from it | ||
| Garyl |
i'd say at this point your quickest option would be to yank the hard drive and add it to the new PC as a slave - that way your new PC can read the files from it How would I go about doing that? Would it matter that the new PC is a different brand(dell)? Are all the ribbon cables(for the C: drive) the same? | ||
| Scottykrein |
They should be the same, and if not you'll easily find an adapter. | ||
| Bdabuell |
the ribbon cable in your new pc most likely has an extra plug in it to accept another drive most drives can be configured to be either master or slave...it's usually through jumpers/pins in the back of the drive. It should be fairly easy to find instructions online for your make/model of drive (i love google) once it's hooked up you may need to go into your BIOS (as the PC starts) to get it to recognize the new drive but XP (i'm assuming your "new" PC is XP?!?) may recognize it on its own - not sure on that | ||
| Iamike |
There will be some jumpers on the back of the HDs (not Harley Davidsons). Your main HD should be set on master and the old one set to slave. The data cable and power cable should be compatible. If you have the recovery disc from you old pc you can put that in the old one if you have power to open the cd drive. When you turn it on it should read it and start the recovery process. If you blew the new power supply you may have something else wrong. | ||
| Garyl |
the ribbon cable in your new pc most likely has an extra plug in it to accept another drive Well, I opened the newer PC(dell) and there is no provision for another drive on the ribbon cable(C: to green board). There are also no extra slots available on the green board to accept another ribbon cable. So I guess I'm back to testing the power supply. If you have the recovery disc from you old pc you can put that in the old one if you have power to open the cd drive. When you turn it on it should read it and start the recovery process Iamike, I cant stress enough that the computer now has NO POWER. There are no lights, sounds, vibrations, nothing. I appreciate that you are trying to help me out here, but I notice that you have now suggested twice that I install a disk and try.  I cannot even open the drive door. There is no power at all. | ||
| Phillyblast |
Gary, Just for grins check the back of the power supply and make sure it is set to the proper voltage - most/all PC power supplies come with a switch for Euro and US power. If that's set right open the box again and check where the Power Supply connects to the Mainboard. Those 4 pin connectors you mentioned are just for accessories (Hard Disk, CD-ROM, etc. so don't worry about them ) It might have just come loose. If everything checks out okay, I'm inclined to think there was a reason the original power supply smoked out, and that has caused the new power supply to give up the ghost as well. | ||
| Spiderman |
Gray. The Power Supply test is right there. You do not have power so chuck it. Go to a computer supply store, DO NOT go to Best Buy or Circuit City they will rip you off. Go to a computer only supply store and buy a new power supply at a computer store it should be rather cheap. I can usually get a whole case with power supply for under 30 bucks. | ||
| Buell920 |
the poor things shot...... I would realy say at this point rip out the hard drive and take it to a local computer shop and have them "gost,copy" what you want out of it and save it to a portable memory stick. Reinstall it in your new computer. this can be done in less than 10 min. well worth the $40-$45 spent. | ||
| Reepicheep |
Another easy way to do it would be to go to a computer store and get an external USB based IDE enclosure (for CD-Rom or hard drive). Not one with a drive in it, just an empty enclosure. They typically run about $30, and you can put a hard drive or CD Rom in the enclosure, and then hook it up as an external USB device. Here is one for hard drives only with "das blinken lights"... http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1215794&CatId=1204 If you get a bigger one, you can put a hard drive in it, or an internal DVD Burner (now like $35 or less) into it. The smaller ones for hard drives only (3.5") are more portable and make better taxi's, but they wont let you copy something and then "give it away forever". | ||
| Bdabuell |
I would realy say at this point rip out the hard drive and take it to a local computer shop and have them "gost,copy" what you want out of it and save it to a portable memory stick. Reinstall it in your new computer. this can be done in less than 10 min. well worth the $40-$45 spent. I'd have to agree at this point...if you're not comfy/familiar with the internals of the new pc, or if it would involve switching out the cable, I'd say have someone else quickly take care of it. Messing up your new pc would suck | ||
| Rasmonis |
Go with Reepicheep's suggestion, it is by far the easiest thing to do. The newer Dells ship with SATA drives and do not have IDE connectors. Depending where you kept your pictures and data re-installing windows may clear old profiles on a new install and wipe all that stuff off the drive. There are several different ways to go about this but connecting the old drive in a USB IDE drive enclosure is the easiest IMO. BEst buy carries these. You can take you old drive with you and a sales rep should be able to help you out. | ||
| Barker |
buy a mac. | ||
| Garyl |
OK, one last idea. While fishing around in the dell, I discovered that the ribbon cable for my cd-rom drive DOES have a 3rd connector in the center of it(between the board connector & the drive connector) So, I swapped ribbon cables between the cd drive and the hard drive. When I had the CD drive ribbon cable out, I noticed that it did indeed have the words: "master" , "slave", and "sys board" printed into the ribbon near the respective connectors. After swapping the ribbon cables, my cd rom connects directly to the board via the old C: drive cable, and I had my dell hard drive plugged into the "master" connector while the HewlettPakrd hard drive was plugged into the "slave" connector. The other end was of course plugged into the board. When I fired it up, I got a DOS environment rather than Windows XP. There was a warning that said something like: "cannot find primary drive device" or something like that (I didn't write it down) So, I shut down, unplugged the HP's drive, and re-booted. Now the dell's working fine. So I guess the ribbon cables ARE interchangeable, but how do I go about getting both drives hooked up? Is there something that I need to re-configure in DOS? Thanks, Gary | ||
| Xring |
You would need to change the jumpers on the back of the HP hard drive to slave. I'm with Reep, though; get the enclosure from Tiger Direct, install the old drive, plug it into a USB port, and get what you want from it. After that, you can still use it for extra drive space. I used the Nexstar enclosure and it works great. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool s/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1337268&CatId=1204 Good luck, Bill | ||
| Reepicheep |
On the older machine, you probably have two IDE channels, each with it's own connector on the motherboard. Each channel (cable) can support at most two devices. On that channel, you select one device to be the master, and one to be the slave, via jumpers on the backs of the drives. Your motherboard will try and boot from the first IDE channel master device. You can probably tell your motherboard (via the Bios, which is a tiny little operating system that loads your real operating system) what other channels you want it to try and boot off of, look for messages inviting you to go to the "setup" screens when you reboot the system, and then look for "boot options" in there. You could get it to boot off the CDRom (and indeed the system may already be trying to do this now), then boot a Linux bootable disk (i.e. Gnoppix or something). That will get you up to where you can use Unix commands to maybe get your data across a network or onto a portable drive. Unix is wonderful, if you spend a decade or so mastering it  But the $30 enclosure from your local mom and pop computer store or internet buy would still be your best bet. I just used mine last night (with a $29 DVD burner) to back up a friends computer for them. Handy little things. | ||
| No_rice |
 i got nuthin, no clue... (Message edited by no_rice on December 07, 2006) | ||
| Garyl |
I got it! Thanks guys. I found the tiny black piece that connects 2 of the 8 pins on the old C: I moved it to the position with the "sl" marking on it, and everything is now on my new PC. All pictures have been recovered. Thanks again, Gary |
