Hi,

How soon after power up does it shut down? If it is only a couple 
seconds, then I would say that your hard drive is probably toast. It is 
drawing too much current, dragging down the supply lines (I would guess 
the 12V supply), or perhaps causing the supply to go into over current 
shut down.

If you are good with electronics and have access to diagnostic equipment 
such as variable bench top power supplies, you could try hooking it up 
with 5V and 12V supplies (red wire on the power connector is 5V, yellow 
is 12V, black is ground) and measure the current drain. If it is indeed 
the 12V, then either the motor controller or the motor itself is 
shorted. If it is the motor, then there is nothing you can do as it is 
integrated inside the platter case itself and would require repair 
inside a clean room. If it is the motor controller or circuitry outside 
the platter case itself, then the circuit board from and EXACT same 
model can often be swapped to get it functional, at least enough to get 
the data off.

Hugh has a suggestion to use an external USB box. This is certainly 
another thing to try, but if the power pins are shorted or otherwise 
drawing too much current, this won't work either.

Russ Poffenberger
[log in to unmask]

ceares wrote:
> The fan was just replaced and the thing is, it works perfectly fine until I add the 2nd hard drive . When that hard drive is removed/unhooked from system, computer operates perfectly. 
>
> The hard drive was taken from another computer that crashed-not sure why-and I just need to get the data off of it. I thought I could add it as a slave drive and do it that way but the minute it's hooked to the computer, there is the shut off problem--it never even gets to boot point, just on-then bloop, off again. 
>
> --- On Mon, 3/16/09, Thomas Mayer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Thomas Mayer <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Hard drive help-round 2
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Monday, March 16, 2009, 10:20 PM
>
> I think we may be hung up on the disk drives being a problem. However, 
> the somewhat normal reason for a computer shutting down unexpectedly is 
> heat. And in this case, with an early on shutdown, the heat is most 
> likely from the CPU. If the CPU fan operates when first turned on, I 
> would investigate the contact between the CPU, the heat sink and the 
> fan. I would also check the fan operation on the video card if so equipped.
>
>   

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