Power Issues

A rather curious computer issue arose today on my parent's desktop computer. For while now it has been a bit dodgy - in fact probably since it was bought a couple of years ago. My step dad built the thing from components on a mission to build what he describes as 'a supercomputer' which in essence is really a high spec PC. He usually makes one or two mistakes but eventually remedies them in a rather crude manner, last time this involved manually tweeking a vast number of BIOS settings in order to get his memory to work. It was literally a case of trial and error - or trial an improvement for you young people out there - going through each setting and adjusting it before testing it to see how many errors you got on MemTest.

This time around, we weren't sure what the problem was, it was so intermittent that it didn't cause a whole lot of problems. Occasionally it would refuse to turn on but nothing serious and once it was on it was usually fine. My mum came to turn it on today however and it booted up onto the secondary hard drive on there to run Windows XP. This had only been put on a couple of weeks ago after one of the programs my step dad used wouldn't run in Vista - he doesn't understand comparability settings or virtual machines so the only logical choice as far as he was concerned was to install XP onto a separate disk.

Thankfully he did this by removing the Vista HDD first otherwise he would have had a whole host of problems with the boot sequence but he was happy enough changing the HDD priorities in the BIOS. Anyway, to cut an already long story short, the computer couldn't detect the primary HDD, it's as though it didn't even exist. It then started refusing to detect other HDDs and wouldn't let me boot from a CD or a memory stick. We currently have two theories, it is either a PSU problem or a motherboard problem. Of course, it could be the HDD as well, but given that there are other issues too, we suspect something larger is at work.

Sadly my desktop machine is in Sheffield and so I have no way of testing the components to narrow down the source of the problem. The only identifiers we have at the moment are the BIOS beeps when the computer starts up which occasionally suggest power problems.