Re: Troubleshooing advice, please...

On 3/24/2024 12:06 AM, Nil wrote:
> It's turning out different than I anticipated. After my computer died, 
> I figured that that PSU was bad and I replaced it. When it still 
> wouldn't boot up I figured the motherboard was bad, too. Time to make a 
> new computer sez I, so today I bought a new motherboard and CPU, and, 
> because I still had a sneaking suspicion, yet another PSU.
> 
> When I got home, to check my suspicion, I put PSU #3 in the old 
> computer... and it booted up! So, it turns out that new PSU #2, the 
> first replacement, was defective. The guy at the checkout at Micro 
> Center had actually warned me that he had recently seen a lot of those 
> Corsair PSUs come back as DOA, but I had already paid and was in a 
> hurry and (wrongly) figured the odds were in my favor.
> 
> So, everything would be hunky-dory now except that I discovered that 
> when the original PSU died, it killed my D hard drive where some of my 
> most precious data was stored. My most recent backup is not all that 
> recent. Nothing I can do about that now.
> 
> Now I have a motherboard (ASUS Prime B550-PLUS) and CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 
> 5700G) that I can either return to the store or go ahead and build a 
> new computer. I need to sleep on it.

I wonder how these DOA power supplies manage to ship ?

Corsair has them contract manufactured, but they're supposed
to at least turn them on, after assembly.

*******

Your software licenses align with the old system,
so that has some value.

*******

The hard drive is supposed to have two protection devices.
One sits across the 12V rail. If the rail rises to 15V,
it starts to conduct. The purpose of a transient suppressor,
is for "hot disconnect" which is a feature of SATA. If the
power connector were to be pulled away, the DC current wants
to continue to flow, and the voltage may have an inductive
spike. The transient device is intended for very short spikes,
and helps protect the components.

Both the 5V rail and the 12V rail have one.

If an incident happens, where an elevated voltage stays
there for a duration of a second or two, that can fry those
components and perhaps burn the label on them.

The "concern points" would be, whether a head amplifier
got damaged, or a motor winding got damaged. The controller
board could be replaced (but you have to move a ROM from
the old controller board to the new controller board,
and you don't know whether the ROM is still good). The
drives now tend to have FDE support, and it's just a guess
on my part, that the ROM they tell you to move, has the
FDE key in it. You can't get the data off, if the key
information is not correct. Whether every drive has
a unique key, or whether unencrypted drives all use the
same key, again, I don't know. Since the HGST website
that "explained hard drives" is gone, that was my only
source of information.

   Paul