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hi, I'm new to the forum and have a problem with a friends pc.

When switched on the fans start for 1 sec then the system powers down, I thought he may have been nessing with the bios (He says not) so I cleared cmos. ran for a few seconds then crash again, so I disconected all but the motherboard and gfx card and system booted fine upto no system so I plughed back in the dvd drive (booted fine) and the hard drive (crashed again). I thought it would be a problem with the hard drive but it works fine in another system. can anyone help me decide if its the PSU or the Motherboard any tests I could do would be helpfull.

thanks

p.s. How do I start a psu withous connecting a motherboard?

Welcome to PCHF smog1979.

Can you try disconnect your DVD drive and only connect the hard drive then try turn the system on.
Does it crash within a couple of seconds or does it crash when it gets to windows?

Try changing the IDE cable that connects to the hard drive.

This can't be done without a motherboard I'm afraid, unless you can find another machine with a board that will support that CPU then I don't think you will be able to test it.

But I don't think it is motherboard/cpu related. If the machine worked fine with everything disconnected and only started crashing when the HD was connected then that is the avenue we should look into.

Yes I have tried the hard drive only and it still crashes (but I have the hard drive in another machine now working fine)

I have seen a case running with no motherboard in a computer shop, something to do with shorting pins on the atx connector, I wanted to do this to check the outputs from the psu.

Thanks

Have you also tried an other IDE cable?

Yeah I tried another and the one I used to hook it up to my computer was the same one.

If you think it is a PSU issue then why not remove the power supply from the other PC and test it in your system.

When you have the hard drive plugged in, where does it crash?

I am getting a psu to try, it crashes straight away with the hard drive in, the fans spin for a second then stop I see nothing on screen.

I forgot to mention after the crash you have to switch the power off it the wall then on again or unplug and replug the power lead.