Hard Drive AND PSU failure! I think???? Help please?

wolfman

OK. Here's the situation. I have an old PC in work which was running all the accounts but not much else. Because that's all it was doing, I didn't bother upgrade

The PC is a Compaq 5240 (From memory this was a 400 or 450 processor)
Windows 98
I think there's 64MB Ram.

Lately it's been kinda locking up every now and again and a quick reboot would sort it. I should mention that its in a very dusty environment but is often left for up to 2 weeks without being used, even though it's left running all the time.

Anyway, today it was frozen on the desktop again and I switched it off for a reboot. Problem is, when I put it back on, it only showed the gig red Compaq logo and sat there and did nothing else. So I tried rebooting about 50 times and about 40 times it went past the red Compaq sign and the cursor sat blinking in the top left corner of the screen and the floppy light was constantly on????

I brought it home and put a recovery cd for a fujitsu (xp version) in to the cd drive and tried that. Then, after a lot of loading up stuff, it eventually told me there was no hard drive on the machine. I repeated this a few times and the same story.

I then took off the cover and looked at all the leads etc, plugged them out, put them in and still the same.

Question 1? Does a drive just STOP like this? Is there anything else I can try?

Then, I f**ked up big time. I thought maybe somebody had hit the switch on the psu and changed it back but not fully, so I moved it to 110(115?) intending to put it back to 230 and try again, but I forgot to switch off the machine!

That leads me to question 2

What size PSU do I need? Both wattage and physically. I see a lot of PSU's mention AT and ATX cases?? How do I know what size case I have?

Thanks for anybody who made it this far and even if you don't have any answers I appreciate you taking the time to read my problem.

Creamy Goodness

with packaged pc's they need to get the right power supply which can only be obtained from the manufactuer in this case compaq. if u get one from a site like say komplett it won't work

wolfman

Do you mean it won't work power wise or dimensionally?

By the way, I have it open now and I see it's a Mitac PSU

Creamy Goodness

well i know i built a pc meself a year ago and stuck in together and tried powering it up with a dell PSU the mobo fried.

wolfman

Doesn't sound great!

Ah well. I might try bringing it into Compustore as that's where I bought it and they might have a PSU for it AND a hard disk by the looks of things

Creamy Goodness

try the drive in another pc if possible

wolfman

What do I do?

I am on a Packard Bell PC at the moment. How do I try it on this? Just plug out the cables from the hard drive on this and then plug in the other one? Surely it's not that simple is it?

Creamy Goodness

yes but turn off the pc first before disconnecting the hard drive

wolfman

wolfman

Ok thanks. I'll be back in a while.. . . .................


Hopefully!

Ronan|Raven

Yes it is as easy as that just make sure the jumper settings are correct and to discharge all static from yerself by touching for example an unpainted part of the case.

Unless compustore have a ready supply of em lying about then it will be hard to get psu for it as compaq use non standard psu's I have tried in vain to get replacements for a lot of compaqs I have seen.

wolfman

Alright I just tried it and the very same behaviour.

Machine started fine, looked like it was about to start and then just hung with the cursor blinking on the top left of the screen and the floppy drive light just remains on constantly.

Call me thick, but I assume that means its f**ked?

What exactly fails on hard drives? Is it electrical, or is it a mechanical part goes or what? I've heard of people getting data off of failed drives. How does that work?

Mac daddy

If it happend in the other pc your drive is gone more than likely.
it could the platters have got damaged from all the dust in the area were you work in, or the logic board is ****ed

Occidental

Try your drive as a slave drive in another machine (change jumper on drive from CS/Master to Slave and insert as a second drive in another PC). When the machine boots check to see if you can see any information on the drive. It would also be worth downloading a hard drive diags program from Western Digital, Seagate, or one of the other manufacturers to run some non-destructive tests on the drive.

For a replacement PSU try sales@servicesource.co.uk . They're normally good for oddball Compaq and Dell PSU's and will take Visa/Mastercard. All they'll need from you is the model number of your Compaq