After 22 years working on these things, I have just ran into something I have never seen before. I have an emachine that one day was working fine and after shutting down it wouldn’t come back up. I first thought it was the hard drive because it wouldn’t spin up. Then I noticed the CD drive wouldn’t open either (I was going to try to boot from it for diagnostics). Since it would be extremely unlikely for the CD and hard drives to be go bad at the same time, and they were connected to the same power lead, I thought it must be the power supply…no such luck. I decided to try a known good drive and it wouldn’t spin up either…power supply good and drive good. Well then I decided for some reason to see if the drives would spin up if not connected to the IDE cable…they both did. Note: One is connected as the primary master and the other as secondary master. Has anyone ever seen this before? What could cause it? It just seems strange to me that both the IDE connector circuits would short out at the same time. Every drive I have tried worked fine until I connected it to either one of the IDE ports (changed cables too). I am confused.
Thanks
