New PSU now won't boot, Baffled!

A good friend of mine brought his PC over, saying it wouldn't boot, I took it apart and looked at the PSU, 2 blown caps, so I replaced it.

He took it home that night, and it worked fine, went to use it the next aft. and nothing, just power up, but not the HDD.

His specs are,
AMD XP2500
Asrock K7VM4
512 DDR
and a WD 40G HDD

Figuring I'd done something wrong I checked it out, and concluded that the HDD would not spin up, unless there was no IDE attached, thinking the IDE controller was gone, I tried another socket A system I threw together, Same problem.

I put his HDD into my own PC, (see sig) and it booted fine, right into windows, and all his data was there.

Last night I put together an ECS K7S5A, ATI9250, 512 DDR, his 2500+, and the same HDD I got the same issue, won't spin up with an IDE cable attached.

So here is a rundown of what I've tried, 3 different boards, 6 different IDE cables, (known to be working) one "new" system, and in my system, both with the HDD on it's own, and with mine attached. I've also tried 4 different spare HDD's on each board that I know to be working with the same problem.

What do you suggest? If I need to Format that's not an issue, I just have about 15 gigs of imortant data to burn to CD, (that sucks).

Thanks in Advance,

Komitet.

If all else fails go for the simple solution. Did you use the right jumper setting on the hdd? If it is the single drive in the system, then the jumper must be in the single drive position. If there is more than one drive, use cable select on both drives. If that doesn't work, then use master on the C drive and slave on the second drive.

Also, be absolutely sure that the data cable is plugged in with the red stripe on pin 1 of both the hdd and the mobo. Finally, make sure that the power cable from the PSU is working. You could have a bad connector coming from the PSU.

thats why i love my portable hdd come in handy when u have to format.

um i had a problem like this, and i was really going nuts and i had jumoers set right, and i was going crazy for about 3 hours, turned out a clear cmos did the trick lol weird i know lol.

I've tried all this with all 3 boards, it's also occured to me that the cd-rom won't power up with an IDE cable either, this is just getting stranger by the minute, I know all the power plugs work, and are putting out the appropriate voltages, (tried hooking it in my own system,

I can't see how I have 3 dead MOBO's that worked fine less than a week ago. I thought maybe the HDD was killing the IDE controllers on my boards, but all drives and cables I've tried in the socket A systems work fine in my own PC

Still baffled, but thanks.

bump, still looking for an answer.

With all the swaps you made, the only thing you haven't tried (I think) is another PSU. The new one could be DOA. It could also just have a bad wiring run to the hdd connector. It could also have a bad connection to the mobo itself.