SOLVED High pitched whine, no power.

Hi all,

I am hoping somebody here can help me with my irritating problem.

Today I changed cases for my build. I thought everything went fine until I plugged everything back in, and all I get is a high pitched whine (I believe from the power supply). When I try to power on, the fans spin for less than half a second and then it cuts out.

I have already tried removing everything apart from one stick of ram and booting that way. Different combinations of RAM. Changing fan plug configurations just in case. All to no avail.

The only tell-tale sign I may have is that when the 8-pin cpu plug is not in, there is no whine. Could this mean that something has shorted my cpu?

Unfortunately I do not have any other parts to try and swap in and out for a process of elimination trial otherwise this would have been a good start.

Any help that may be given will be very well recieved!

Take it all back out of the case and build it on a cardboard box. If that works there must have been a short somewhere... look for extra mainboard standoffs for a start

King107s said:

Take it all back out of the case and build it on a cardboard box. If that works there must have been a short somewhere... look for extra mainboard standoffs for a start

Click to expand...

This^^^

Pretty sure it's a short or somehow your power supply decided to crap out.

Gonna try this when I get home from work tomorrow. I really hope there is just a small short somewhere that is preventing a boot, rather than something having died, especially the processor.

OK, I breadboarded the pc today. This time there is no whine and it boots, but only as far as the loading windows icon. At this point just as the little Windows 7 balls meet I get a blue screen very quickly and it cycles back through. It then tries a system recovery but claims not to find anything it can fix after checking for disk errors.

Any clues on this little fun problem?

The short could have corupted data on your hard drive. Try to repair the MBR.

The MBR is probably fine if you're getting a windows loading screen, but he's correct in concluding there might be some data corruption. The other possibility is that the short has damaged the power supply, and it won't keep the cpu and/or memory running at a high enough voltage for long enough. In the bios there should be a system status screen and you can verify if the various power rails are providing sufficient voltage. Otherwise I'd try to boot into safe mode (if it boots into safe mode then it should just boot into normal), and if that doesn't work a repair install of windows.

Other obvious things to verify:

memory is inserted properly
pci/pcie cards inserted firmly

I think the hard drive idea hit it on the head. I loaded a copy of Windows onto a spare hard drive I had and it all works fine. Haven't had any problems at all.

Put the old one into a caddy to retrieve as many files as I could if it was dying and it too works fine. I think it may just be playing silly buggers. No big loss though as all my work, photos and so on have been recovered; just got a fresh install of Windows to work with.

You might want to be sure the PSU wasn't the root cause of the hard drive failure though...