I’m hoping to get some suggestions on fixing my rig. I think the PSU broke but I’m nervous playing with power.
I had an APC battery backup ‘fail’. It had a steady tone and F02 error on screen. A few peripherals (HDDs) still had power but my desktop pc was not on.
Ok, fine, I unplug everything and start to plug everything in to a power strip. The last item to plug-in was the PC but as I did that I heard a loud pop. I figured it was just from the way I plugged it. So, I continue to turn on the PC. Right away a hear medium-pitched whine that slowly descends in pitch for about two seconds until I hear two loud POP POP. Then the smell of burning electrical coming from inside the case. I couldn’t see any burn marks or issues with the rig.
What do you think? Is it the PSU? How do i check it without electrocuting myself? Is it something else?
Could well be a blown capacitor inside the PSU box, so not visible. You can take out the PSU after disconnecting the cables and ‘smell it’ away from the PC. Hopefully it is the PSU, easily replacable and not that expensive compared to other components.
I think the logical next step is simply buy a replacement psu and see if it will fire up. Hopefully it didn’t take anything else with it. If your not comfortable i wouldn’t bother opening or anything just replace it. Its not terribly uncommon that you get the power supply replaced after a spectacular failure and then find motherboard haveing a problem.
Thanks for the suggestions! That’s what I did - I got a new PSU, hooked it up and it was able to start up. It appears that only 2 hard drives may have been damaged (out of 14) and everything else is working.
I got a cheap PSU tester and tested the old one - its completely dead. No power coming out of the cables. So, no more Cooler Master products for this guy.
“Damaged” as in “ata7 softreset failed” “ata12 softreset failed” errors appearing at bootup and they are not recognized in ubuntu at all. Not sure how to fix this issue tbh.
One is a Western Digital 16TB and the other is a Seagate 16TB. I haven’t had a chance to pull them out and figure out what is wrong. They are not on the same power cable.
I should mention my 500GB Seagate boot drive was corrupted but fsck was able to fix and recover it.