Massive problems

[Amblin]

Hi!
I recently was at a LAN at a friend and when I got back home to hook everything back in, I could sense a smell of something burning and I also saw a little stream of smoke. I could not however, locate where it came from.

I own a Sonata 2, 3000+ Venice and a Fatal1ty An8 motherboard.

When I hook the powercable to my Sonata 2 PSU and flip the powerswitch it stands for maybe 20 seconds and pendle between "2.0" and "F." on the status-LCD of the motherboard. After those 20 seconds have passed, everything starts. This is my first problem. Could it be the PSU or the motherboard itself that is damaged?

And yesterday I experienced some other stuff with one of my drives. CRC errors started occuring when I tried to read/write files from it. And finally the drive (which is a Maxtor 250 gig non SATA) started clicking and Windows refused to boot up, which is weird since it´s slaved.


Any problems what so ever would be MOST helpful since I don´t know whether to by a new PSU or a new Motherboard.

And any tips for recovering files back from the drive would also be SO nice since it was my most important drive, with projectfiles and samples for my music, dated back to about 5 years.

//Thanks in advance. Frank

[mcmiller]

you need to check to see what the ouput on each of the rails is if you wanna check if the psu is ok, get a amp meter and test it.
you really need to find out what the lcd output is saying as well, not sure if your manual will tell or maybe the website of the motherboard, as that will give you a good indication of the problem

[Fed]

I definitely agree with what mcmiller said, thats a very scientific way to go about it. However, to add to that, something a little more basic - since your drive is clicking, it means that either your drive is dying, or your PSU. Since youve had a few other problems, which arent related to harddrives (like the readouts on the mobo), it seems that its really quite likely that your PSU is the culprit. For starters, I would say unplug your drive, since the corruption should only affect the things that you touch now, so the more you leave alone now, the more should remain intact.

Also, if you dont have an amp meter then perhaps you or a friend might have another power supply to try out, that could be another way to test.

[notsobig]

Do you think you can borrow PSU from your friend? From the sound of it, I too think it's PSU problem. Get working PSU from somewhere and hook it up and see if that makes any difference. And don't turn on your PC anymore until you find out what the real problem is. Bad PSU might just damage your other hardwares and it's too risky.

[BigBry]

I had a similar thing a while ago. Remove all the PSU connections and see if anything has melted at the connection end. I had a 4 pin ATX cable melt into the motherboard and despite that it still worked until I discovered where my smell came from.