HDD Fried?

[robyates77]

The entire story is sort of a long one, so I'll only elaborate if someone asks me to, but basically long-story-short, what happened was I plugged in a new PSU to just the 24pin slot and the 4 pin slot on the mobo, just to try it, because when I tried it a week and a half ago, it didn't work, and my computer wouldn't start, and i was told that I fried my mobo and most likely my CPU.
I plugged it to just those two slots, and the power came on, the PSU started up, fans were on, everything seemed fine.
I got all happy, thinking "I thought I had a dead PC these past 2 weeks and now it's working :')"
Sooooo, I plugged the rest of the cables from the PSU into the HDD and the CD/DVD drive, and plugged in my mouse, keyboard, etc. to the back.
I powered it on, and started smelling smoke, my eyes were quickly drawn to my hard drive, so I shut the power off as fast as I could after noticing the smoke.
I tried googling different things to troubleshoot, and it seems this has happened to a lot of people, supposedly because they plugged a sata cable into the Hard drive upside down...does that sound about right? Cause I'm gonna be pissed if I fried my HDD just because I put a damn cable in upside down...>_<

I guess my question is: is my hard drive fried? How can I check?

As you can imagine, I'm afraid to touch anything, but at the same time I wanna try a bunch of different stuff til something works or breaks. But I will play the waiting game.....

 

[noise]

You would have the really force the SATA connector to get it on upside down. Most likely the cable connector and/or HDD socket would be very obviously damaged. I'd look at those first.

Also examine the cable plastic so see if it is burnt - the plastic would have distortions/scorches.

To be honest I doubt forcing the SATA cable in upside down would cause a short as the connectors would be facing away from each other. I'm thinking this is probably just a very bad mechanical failure in the HDD.

 

[UnlimitedBanana]

Wow, if you did put it upside down, I applaud you for not breaking the connector. But it's probably not that, as Noise said, check the cables and then check on a broken HDD (if you have one) to see if the PSU's Sata Rail isn't broken, if it is then you most likely have fried the mechanical parts of your HDD. If you're lucky there will be zero to no damage on the disk itself, and it would be possible to extract the data from it. Hope I helped!

 

[pjmelect]

A faulty power supply can easily damage a motherboard but I have never known one to damage the CPU. (and I have seen hundreds of computers like this) If you connect even momentary the power supply the wrong way around to a hard drive, you will destroy the hard drive with little chance of recovering your data. This normally happens when you try to connect the cable with the power on. To connect the SATA power cable the wrong way around you would have needed to break off the polarizing lugs on the connector which is possible to do unfortunately. If you are this clumsy then perhaps you should not be playing about with the insides of a computer. Connecting the SATA data cable the wrong way around will cause no damage to the hard drive.

 

[InvalidError]

To connect the SATA power cable the wrong way around you would have needed to break off the polarizing lugs on the connector which is possible to do unfortunately.

If you flip the power (or data) connector, the contact fingers end up facing away from the mating connector's fingers thereby making contact between the two physically impossible but if the connector has a metal-plated back-side, I suppose the PSU could short on that.

 

[robyates77]

Ok, so here's the update:

I decided to try putting back in my old stock PSU of 250w just to see if by some chance it worked....

and it freaking worked.....

I have no clue how this happened....honestly, people have been telling me for the last week that I fried my motherboard, my power supply, my CPU, and/or both/all, and I end up trying my original PSU and it decides to work...THIS TIME.

I tried to power on my computer with my old PSU plenty of times in the past week, mind you. So I don't understand why it's working now.
My computer is on, nothing on my hard drive seems to be missing, everything works fine, just as it used to.

Is it possible that the new PSU that I plugged in last night (which is when the hard drive started smoking) gave my system some kind of much-needed jolt of energy to get everything back to the way it was before originally plugging in the new PSU (which is when I was told that I fried my mobo)?

No clue how this happened, any guesses on how this is even possible..?

 

[InvalidError]

Is it possible that the new PSU that I plugged in last night (which is when the hard drive started smoking) gave my system some kind of much-needed jolt of energy to get everything back to the way it was before originally plugging in the new PSU (which is when I was told that I fried my mobo)?

Unlikely.

The more likely explanation is that you may have had metallic debris somewhere shorting power to ground that prevented your PC from booting, the new PSU blew it up / melted it off either enough to break the short or enough for you to shake it loose while re-installing your old PSU and now your PC is working again.

 

[robyates77]

But why did my computer stop working in the first place?
A week ago, I installed the new PSU and a graphics card with it (idk if that's significant info or not), and the computer wouldn't boot up, only for half a second, then turn off instantly. Tried putting back the original PSU, and that wouldn't work either. People led me to believe at that point, that i fried my motherboard.
I don't understand how everything worked out

 

[InvalidError]

Re-read my previous comment.

When you initially swapped hardware, you probably knocked something without noticing and caused a short that prevented the computer from booting normally/shutdown. The short got cleared during the "smoke show" or something you did afterward and now the computer works again.

In other words, you were lucky.

 

[robyates77]

So shorts can clear if another short happens? Lol I don't understand, I'm still a super noob at all this computer business.
So your guess is, I knocked something initially, and when I went back a week later to try the new PSU again, I knocked it back into place, but the hard drive didn't like what was happening so it started smoking...yeah I'm lost.
I agree with the lucky part though hahaha.

 

[InvalidError]

So shorts can clear if another short happens?

No, shorts can clear if you pump enough power through it to blow it out, which might be what happened when you plugged the other PSU back in and got the smoke show.

 

[robyates77]

shouldnt something be not working still?

 

[kirye1337]

Did you use cables from your old power supply? Because if you did they're most likely fried. I did this mistake yesterday and no I'm looking at a 500$ fix