Posted on 09/18/2006 5:49:16 PM PDT by Eccl 10:2
Need assistance from any techno-geeks out there, please.
OK - my PC (emachines T1840, Celeron 1.8Ghz) died. I went to turn it on a week ago and nothing happened. The power supply fan was not working.
I would like to get this running, and also retrieve our family photos on the hard drive.
So I replaced the power supply - didn't work.
Then I replaced the motherboard - didn't work.
Next I replaced the processor - didn't work.
Last I replaced the RAM - didn't work.
At this point, all I get is a fast ticking sound in time with the hard-drive LED blinking in the front - about 2x per second. That's all. No beeps. No acknowledgement on the screen of any activity.
Help? Any ideas?
If you hard drive isn't trashed, you can always stick it in another machine to retrieve your photos. But you probably know that...
'your' not 'you' in the previous post, of course.
Put the drive into another computer.
As silly as that sounds, that was the problem with mine once. I also had replaced the power unit, but turned out to be as simple as buying a new power cord.
Sounds like something that happened to me a couple of years ago with an old system.......
Does your system have a floppy drive??
My floppy drive died and took the power supply with it.
When the floppy died, all the smoke was released from the power supply...;-)
Worth a look. BOL.
If you install it on another machine, and the machine goes fritzy as soon as you turn it on, yank the plug immediately before you fry the other machine and kiss it bye bye. It is fried.
If the machine boots, then you can try to get into it, but if you can't the drive is fried.
If the info is valuable, there are places that can recover it. If not, chuck it.
Something else, I assume you know that if you get the polarity wrong on any of the pin connectors, the machine will not boot. Could fry the drive as well.
"Replace the power cord.
As silly as that sounds, that was the problem with mine once. I also had replaced the power unit, but turned out to be as simple as buying a new power cord."
"When the floppy died, all the smoke was released from the power supply...;-)
Worth a look. BOL."
"Something else, I assume you know that if you get the polarity wrong on any of the pin connectors, the machine will not boot. Could fry the drive as well."
I would unplug all the peripherals (hard drive, floppy, etc). Leave the memory in. Power it up and try to see if you can get to the BIOS setup screen (usually) by hitting DEL.
And remember it might be your lcd/monitor.
OOps, my previous post was for you.
"I would unplug all the peripherals (hard drive, floppy, etc). Leave the memory in. Power it up and try to see if you can get to the BIOS setup screen (usually) by hitting DEL.
And remember it might be your lcd/monitor."
might be the screen itself? What is the screen doing?
If it is not a shorted floppy or cd drive,(un plug at the power and data connector, one at a time and try to boot) then it must be the hard drive.
A bad drive acts the same way. nothing happens. Or you get a clicking which is a failed boot attempt.
I'm guessing it got popped by a line surge caused by a storm or something.
If you can't get to the bios setup screen, you might be toast.
Check the board to see if there is a jumper to reset the bios. If not, WITH THE MAIN POWER CORD DISCONNECTED, try to find the battery that keeps the bios charged. Remove it. Short out the leads that go to the battery, this will totally power down your bios. reinstall the battery that keeps the bios alive, reattach the real wall power, then try to boot.
If that don't work, hire a pro. I get $92.00 an hour
If that's it, then do a Google search for "head disk clicking sound freezer" for various suggestions. The first hit will be on Experts Exchange. They are worth the one month fee you will have to pay them - don't forget to cancel your subscription after you get your answer. Other hits will provide free answers of varying quality and amusement value.
The Click Of Death is actually the Whack Of Death.My summary - sometimes freezing works, sometimes whacking it works (or harms it), and usually paying $1000 to someone who knows what they are doing and has the tools works.
There are two motors in a hard drive. The first is obvious -- it's the spindle motor that spins the platters. In the very old days, these were awesome 1800 or 2400 rpm self-sync DC motors. These were cool toys. Later ones were 3600 rpm DC motors, with external sync via hall effect sensors -- 3600rpm, you wonder? SImple. 60 rotations per second, made the clocking easy. Modern ones, spinning up to 15K, are very simple DC servo motors with very, very complicated controllers that sense the speed via back EMF on the motor coils. Very trick, and useless in other projects, but once you've got the software, really cheap and fast.
The "Freeze the drive" trick is for problems with the spindle motor. A shorted coil in a motor keeps it from spinning. Freezing it can move the coil such that it isn't shorting, and the drive spins. Whack the drive fixes stiction -- a bearing, or a head, sticks to the platter, and it doesn't have enough torque to spin the drive. A whack breaks things lose, and the motor can spin the disk.
That's not the problem here.
The other motor is the head positioner. In the old days, these were stepper motors, and the stepper on the ST 3040A was legendary -- guys would pray this drive would die so they could steal it. Steppers, however, are only so precise and fast, so modern drives use voice coils to quickly place the heads just so. Originally, there would be either a "wedge" on one of the platters that had tracks that the heads could use to quickly find tracks, or an entire side of a platter was used for dedicated information about where the tracks were. Modern drives use what's called "embedded servo" information -- the information about where the tracks lie is underneath the data, so you don't lose the capacity of a wedge or dedicated servo.
This leads to the Whack Of Death. To move the heads, a current is sent in the voice coil, and the heads count the tracks as they cross the servo lanes. So, to move 50 tracks in, the coil charges, creating a magnetic field, and since it's stuck between two really powerful magnets, it moves, and fast. The heads count tracks until they reach 50, then the current stops charging, and the heads stop.
What's the whack? The whack is the heads hitting the stop that keeps them from moving off the platters completely. What is happening -- the heads can't tell where the tracks are, so they keep swinging, until they hit the stop. This gets noticed, the controller retracts the heads all the way to the center, and it tries again.
WHACK. WHACK. WHACK.
This means: 1) The heads can't sense position information, and 2) The drive is almost certainly toast. 95% of the time, it's the head that's on the servo platter. 5% of the time, it's a controller or power issue. You can try the drive in another computer, but usually, you ask the $1000 question, which is "Is the data on this drive, that I haven't backed up recently, despite the lectures every sysadmin has given me repeatedly, worth $1000?"
That being the cost of sending the drive off to the clever guys with lots of toys who can read the data off.
IOW. The drive is almost certainly toast. If the data is really important, you can send it to a disk recovery place, who will charge you lots of money, and send back the data on CD or whatnot. If it's not, you buy a new drive (or two and a mirroring controller) and resolve to be better about backups next time.
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