Which PSU?

Peter3hg

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I blew up my PSU yesterday and need to go and get a new one when the shops open today. The three I have narrowed it down to are the BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 550w

e02_EImage_HW08PowerSupplyBeQuiet_001_BeQuietDarkPowerPro1000W_01_600x390.jpg


or the OCZ ModXstream Pro 500w

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or the Silverstone Strider 600w

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Any advice?
 
Can you post the components of your PC? You might not need as much wattage.
 
Intel E8500
Ati HD4870
2GB ram
2 HDDs
A few 80mm case fans
 
450-500 Watts would be plenty sufficient for that. I'd recomment BeQuiet and Seasonic, since I've made solely good experiences with those brands.
 
the cheapest one.

All 3 brands are pretty good, and they are all modular PSUs. So just choose the cheapest and the one that offers the most amps.

500w is more than enough for your machine.
 
The cheapest is the OCZ but my concern with it is that while it is modular, it doesn't have a lot of choice of cables which seems to largely remove the point of it being modular as you will still end up with a fair bit of cable redundancy.

ocz_modxstream.jpg
 
The OCZ gets quite good reviews though. If you can live with its cable management, I'd go for that one.
 
I got the OCZ. Unfortunately my PC is now hanging on "Verifying DMI Pool Data". I guess this means that the HDD has been toasted?
 
unplug the other drive and see if you can boot up with the main hard drive.

I don't think your hdd is toasted.
 
unplug the other drive and see if you can boot up with the main hard drive.

I don't think your hdd is toasted.

I've tried booting with both HDDs (the main one has XP on it, the other has Windows 7 on it) and I get the same issue. If I boot with neither drive it asks for a disk which would suggest it is to do with the HDD. I'm guessing it is actually freezing after the Verifying Dmi message but it just freezes before any other message comes up.

I've just installed XP on a partition of the drive that had Windows 7 on. It seems to be working as it has gone beyond the stage where it first reboots with no issue.
 
I've dragged off all my important documents and files onto an external drive. However, preferably I would still like to be able to recover my installation. Now if I boot from my main drive, I get an error about the Boot disk configuration.
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected bootdisk, check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information."
Is there any way to recover from this? Can I use something like Acronis TrueImage and then format the drive and recover it from there?
 
Have you tried to recovery function with windows xp boot cd?
 
Yeah, I tried to just add a new boot entry but it wouldn't read the drive properly so wouldn't do it. I then ran the ChkDsk which came up with an error so I'm running the ChkDsk /r at the moment (which is taking forever but I suppose it will do).
 
The chkdsk repaired the drive and it is no longer finding an error. However, bootcfg still doesn't work, I get the error "Failed to successfully scan disks for Windows installations...". I've tried fixboot with no joy.

Edit: I think having an external drive connected was giving slightly different results. It now just says "Disk Boot Failure, Insert System Disk And Press Enter".
 
Last edited:
It's all working now. I tried writing a few of the boot files from the CD back onto the drive. Plugged all the drives back in, and it fired up first time. Thanks for all your help.
 
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