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hard drive access light not working

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3 replies

by yul711

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I installed the brand new motherboard MSI K87 Neo2 Platinum in my computer having three IDE hard drives (two drives master-slave on one IDE connector) and one drive alone through PCI IDE card. Second IDE connector connects DVD-RW and CD/RW as master-slave. No RAID, no SATA drives present. All drives are recognized fine by BIOS, computer works fine, power indicator works, but hard drive access light does not work. I tried to flip light connector to motherboard pins, but it did not help. BIOS flushed with the latest version. Same light connector and same hard drives worked fine on the old failed motherboard. Any ideas/suggestions how to make hard drive access indicator work? Many thanks for help.

3 replies

by ozi eagle

Hi,

Three possibilities.

1/ HDD LED or wiring has become faulty. Test with 9V battery and 1k ohm series resistor, to limit current. Single cell won't work, as LED turn on voltage can be as high as 2.5 V. Reverse connections if first try doesn't work. If neither way works LED or wiring faulty.

2/ LED connected to wrong pins on mobo. Often this is very hard to determine, the writing on the board can mean the pins are along the connector or across it. Triple check this. Also the polarity.

3/ Mobo circuit is faulty. Use a known good LED and cable and connect to mobo. See above.

by yul711

Thank you so much for help. My problem was with the bad indicator microbulb.

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