[SORTA SOLVED:] Re: recover from a bad F16 install

[Paul Allen Newell]

On 3/21/2012 4:58 AM, Tim wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 12:59 -0700, Paul Allen Newell wrote:
>> I hadn't thought of the power supply as I assumed that if that were
>> the problem, everything would go down rather than selective components
>> as it got worse and worse.
> If a power supply is sagging, other things may have started working,
> *then* a drive may try starting up, afterwards.  This changes the load
> on the power supply, and the output from a failing power supply may drop
> (voltage go down, as it's less able to supply current).
>
> Hard drives do some self tests as they start up, and may abort working,
> all by themselves.  Various bits of hardware are quite dumb, and simply
> do what they can when power is applied.  They may error, at some time,
> if the power supply goes really bad.  But if the supply is marginal, it
> may be good enough for some things, but not for other things.  It can
> also be that a power supply is good enough to run the drive, but not
> good enough for getting it to start up.  So the drive may start
> sometimes, but not others.
>
> Marginally good supplies are one of those things that can be hard to
> measure, if you're just going to poke around with a voltmeter, not
> really knowing much about what you're doing.  The meter can show the
> average, or steady-state, voltages, which may be okay readings.  It's a
> bit harder to see how things go momentarily bad, when a drive tries to
> start up.
>
> Of course, some users may not attribute things occasionally failing to
> being any particular fault.  e.g. The average Windows user are used to
> the system randomly doing stupid things, and do nothing about trying to
> fix the problem, thinking that, "computers are just like that."
>
> Power supplies need to be able to supply more watts than the
> steady-state demand of a running system (that's if you even know what
> the requirements of the parts are, most don't list them, so you may have
> to make guesses - there are on-line calculators for estimating this).
> They need to be able supply more than the average requirement of the
> hardware, so the supply isn't always working hard to produce the normal
> amount of power to run the hardware, and to account for the turn-on
> current (which is higher).  On the other hand, putting a 500 watt supply
> into a computer that only needs 150 watts is a bit ridiculous, and a
> waste of money.
>
>> Took a look on eBay and pwoer supplies and certainly cheaper than
>> motherboards --- I'm seeing $60-$90 range. I can see a whole lot of
>> xw8000 stuff and it doesn't look like any of them have a bid.
> It can be hard to justify buying parts for a system you don't think is
> worth maintaining, but it's handy to accumulate spare bits and pieces.
> You probably will want to fault-find something, at some stage, or for a
> friend.  On that note, you don't have to get a spare power supply, you
> could unplug one from some other computer, try it out, then put it back
> in.  Or, it may be the easier solution to unplug the hard drive and try
> that out on another computer.  And, as another message brought up, you
> may be able to temporarily remove one or two thing in your computer, to
> reduce the load on the power supply.  Though, if it works, it does point
> a finger at the power supply.  But, if the fault doesn't clear, you
> could still have a power supply problem.  It depends on whether what you
> removed reduced the load on the supply sufficiently to make a
> significant difference.
>
> I'm lucky, in one sense, that people tend to give me old bits of
> electronic junk, knowing that I work in that field, and I get to
> accumulate some spares.  On the other hand, I often get given stuff
> that's complete junk, and have to find space for it, or ditch it.  ;-)
>

Tim:

Thanks for the reply. I'm still looking for my xw8000 manual to figure 
out how to yank things one by one (I remember something about there 
being a particular socket to use when there is only one of something). 
The fact that it is taking this long to do is due to my conviction that 
losing the machine is looking like less and less of an issue each day.

The hard drives are circa early 2000's, which means they are small size 
(among other things). One DVD drive is probably worth recovering, the 
other is CD only. I could use the graphics card as a backup for my two 
x4000's ... aside from that it is so old that I wouldn't bring into a 
newer machine. This box is the only one I have that uses DIMM (?) 
memory, so the RAM is useless to me.

I'll get around to testing ... but reality says that once the thought of 
a hardware failure entered into the equation, the interest level just 
plunged.

Paul