I was trying to fix my Dad’s PS3 (he recently passed away) nothing was working, so I connected the HDD from the PS3 into my PC. Upon plugging in the SATA cable, the entire PC shut off. I unplugged the HDD, but now when I power on the PC, the fans just run at max speed and nothing else happens. I don’t know how to troubleshoot this problem.
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First thing I’d check is unplug all sata cables from the board, turn off your power supply, give it a few minutes, then turn it on, then your PC.
PCs are loaded with poly fuses that self reset after some time. It can take up to a day for some really fickle ones. So maybe just sleep on it.
While you’re waiting/unplugging inspect the hard drive, the sata cable, and the port for damage.
Try unplugging the power, holding the power button for a solid 10 seconds, plugging it back in and turning it on. Feels like magic, but it clears out the capacitors and has helped me in a few Jams. Also, if you haven’t already, unplug the HDD.
You plugged in a data cable from the PS3s hard drive to your motherboard while it was on? That could be a problem, depends on the motherboard
Speaking of which, what’s the make/model of your motherboard?
Wait did you plug in cables with the power still on ?
Sata is hot swap. There’s even cases with a sata bay on the top. I had one like 10 years ago and it was amazing.
Yeah I knew Esata could hotswap and motherboards with that can but not all motherboards are configured to have hot swap enabled the main problem is the power connector in a non Esata drive or without an enclosure plugging in a sata cable can jiggle the power cable and short something on a rare occasion.
Sata data doesn’t do enough power to cause any damage to itself. Serial data lines don’t care if you short them. Sata power has grounds in the way so you can’t send 5v to 3.3v or 12v to 5v.
You’ll break the sata cable before you cause any damage to your computer (ask me how I know)
Technically, most are hot plug. The SATA (not just eSATA) specs were designed from the beginning to allow it. That’s why the different pins (fingers) are different lengths. For it to be compliant with the spec, it must be ok to connect/disconnect while the power is live.
Meh, it’s probably nothing. Upon plugging the SATA power cable or data cable? Try unplugging the power cable from your PC and holding the power button for 10 seconds. Then plug the power cable back and turn on the PC.
I plugged the HDD in WHILE the PC was on (yes, I know, what a fucking moron).
I don’t know what to do.
Update: was able to find a local place that knows what they are doing. Turns out I fried the North Bridge 🙄. Got a new MoBo in the way. I hope I can get away with just a plug and play.
Hey, we do it with external HDDs. Mistakes happen.
I hope this works out for you.
There’s nothing wrong with doing this. A motherboard that doesn’t support sata hot swap is by far the exception not the rule. I have never encounter a board in the last 10 years that doesn’t support this.
Why did you even think of doing that?
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Here’s how I would troubleshoot that:
[EDIT] Obvious but very important when you power your PC, if anything starts smelling like smoke, stop immediately. You don’t want a house fire on top of your dead PC.
- Does you PC POST?
- If no, does it spits error messages (or even mobo beeps)? If so you can figure out what’s going on with the mobo manual, but it’s probably a bad news for your PC.
- If it POST, go to the BIOS and look what hardware you can see. Do you see your system disk and / or your PS3 disk?
- If no disk appear at all, maybe you fried the SATA controller. In that case, you can probably boot a disk from USB to salvage your data.
- If the disks appear, try and boot them. If it doesn’t work, either the disk died or you just need to re-install your OS.
Let us know how it is going! Good luck!
- Does you PC POST?
For you and all those suggesting this should not happen. Our motherboards and devices come in antistatic bags FOR A REASON!
Of course its a bad idea to plug any cables into a motherboard while it is running. You should always tun off the power, unplug the power cable and ideally hole the power button for a bit.
Reason being that the board runs on 3-12 volts with very little amps which can be easily fried by static electricity, let alone random plugged in cables that possibly arent correctly grounded yet.
Try (as suggested by others) to unplug the hdd you connected, run it again. If that doesnt help, unplug power cord, hold power button for 10 secs, plug back in, start back up. If that doesnt do it, unplug, unload and start pulling off all devices (take photos if before if you need it for remembering config) and try a minimal start.
If minimal doesnt work, try a different power supply, hoping you only broke that. If that doesnt work either you are the proud owner of a broken motherboard (or ram, or cpu).
In any case, please never put your hands on electrical devices while they are running. It is not safe or smart.
SATA was explicitly designed to do exactly this. The long pins are for ground.
Mistakes can still occur. Just because it is designed to be resilient does not mean that it’s infallible.
Nothing on the screen?
Usually you plug/unplug sata when it’s off. But I don’t think that should happen. Take it to a pc repair shop. You might have blown a fuse.
