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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   897 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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First thing to do if you haven't already is load the BIOS and reset the configuration. Many enthusiast systems have performance setting options which will attempt to overclock various components, which usually works, but when it doesn't it can cause issues like what you describe. There should be an option to set everything back to normal or safe settings, which might fix the problem all by itself.

Second thing to do is try booting a recovery environment like https://www.system-rescue.org/. If this is successful, you can try to mount the hard disk partitions to copy data to another drive or network share. This won't work if the disk is encrypted, unfortunately. You would be able to test the RAM though - it's one of the boot options on that image. You could also run a few hardware tests, like copying the hard drive blocks to /dev/null to test for read errors.

Another tip that might help you is that if it's a standard ATX power supply, you can try scrounging one from just about any other standard PC. The machine will need no more than around 100 watts just to boot up. The high power requirements only really come into play when working the GPU and CPU hard.

I can't get completely through a boot cycle, which is why I'm leaning towards flakey power supply. It's a dual CPU, wouldn't a low watt psu put stress on that? Sorry, I haven't really played with hardware since I had to put the IRQ jumper on my soundblaster. Swapping out memory is easy, calculating power needs is harder.

I'll dig through the boxes of spare bits and see if there's a power supply in there. Oh! Somewhere in his building o junk there's a fluke. If I find that I should be able to narrow down issues. Thanks for putting me on this line of thinking.

First thing to do if you haven't already is load the BIOS and reset the configuration.

Another reply pointed out, "Motherboards often have raid features built in, but those have also gone out of fashion, because they’re unreliable and often lead to tough data recovery situations at times like this."

But they are the sort of thing that a geek who wanted to squeeze out a little more performance (speaking from experience) might be tempted to turn on, so IMHO the first thing to do is to load the BIOS and record (even if just with a few photos) the configuration, just to make sure there aren't any weird settings like RAID striping that might be necessary to read the drives but might be lost in a reset.

The specs say the motherboard system has a built in raid. But I'm not clear if it was required, and he did use this system for gaming, and he typically used raids for redundancy not speed. OTOH he also did a lot of graphics processing ... yeah, betting going with a drive enclosure isn't going to solve my problem here. Still, worth a first pass.

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