Hey guys,

I hope you can help with a dilema!

Following a failure of my hard drives, I couldn't pin down why my 2 year old PC would all of a sudden fail. I originally had two hard drives, and neither would boot. In fact one of the hard drive didn't even show up in BIOS.

The two hard drives were identical, so I removed one to see which one happened to be causing the problem. Now, with just the one hard drive plugged in, everything seemed fine and working.

I decided to upgrade my hard drives and went for two Samsung HD4800LD 400GB intending on a raid setup.

I also supposed that my 350W PSU (FSP Group - OEM) wasn't up to scratch so I ugraded to a X-POWER 600W PSU.

Now here's where the trouble started!

I installed the new PSU as I am used to doing so. The 20pin/4 pin connectors went into the motherboard. All the components got the relevant power connectors (2 optical drives, and the 2 aforementioned harddrives).

So I plug in the power lead to the PSU and flick the on switch on the PSU. The green motherboard light comes on, so I assume the PSU is providing power. Having everything connected correctly, I press the power-up button and the CPU fan spins momentarily then dies out again.

My graphic card has no fan and the PSU fans do not spin. The green light on the motherboard remains on but there is no furhter responsiveness i.e. until I unplug the power lead and allow for discharge and repeat the process, the fans won't respond when I press the startup button on the computer.

I found it odd that when I disconnected the power lead from the PSU, and reconnected the 20 pin connector, the green led on the motherboard came on. Is such a huge residual charge normal?

The old PSU powers up the computer as expected, allowing for me to boot from my Vista installation CD onto the new harddrives as expected.

:takecall: Helps! (I really hope you can!)

ps - my conclusion is that it is a faulty PSU and I will be returning it to the store asap.