Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!gatech!ukma!simon
From: simon@ms.uky.edu (G. Simon Gales)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Hard Disk Problems
Summary: nasty noises, initialization failure on boot
Message-ID: <12876@s.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 9 Oct 89 16:38:39 GMT
Reply-To: simon@ms.uky.edu (G. Simon Gales)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 23

I've noticed something about my 286 at home that could be a problem.  After
the box is turned off for more than 5 minutes or so, it has problems booting
back up.  The drive makes all sorts of noises - heads popping and such - and
the bios says the drive could'nt be initialized.

If I let the thing sit for about 10-15 minutes, or just keep ctl-alt-del'ing
for 15 minutes, the thing will boot eventually and run without any problems
at all.  Just a cold <power-up> boot has problems.  Turning it off, then 
back on immediately causes no problems.

My suspicion is that the power supply is too puny to pull all of the drives -
a 40 meg full-ht, 20 meg half-ht, 1.2 meg floppy, and a 10meg Irwin tape. The
motherboard is a WD that requires only 15 watts.  Finally, it has an internal 
modem and 1meg on a RamPage card.  All powered from a 115 watt power supply.

Has anyone noticed these symptoms before?  Was the power supply the problem?
 thanks,
	 simon.
-- 
Simon Gales@The University of Kentucky
   simon@ms.uky.edu             | 'Fate... protects fools, little children,
   simon@UKMA.BITNET            |  and ships named Enterprise.' 
   {rutgers, uunet}!ukma!simon  |                           - Riker, ST:TNG