Sorry I’m asking this without specs at hand; I’m away from my desktop at the moment.

I built a PC a few months back, and went through this long, irritating ordeal of installing Win 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC (a driver wasn’t working for the video card; eventually the driver got updated, and now it’s great; otherwise, MASGrave is fantastic). I have a 2Tb PCI-e drive. But. Any time I try to install an old 3.5" 7200rpm SATA drive, it won’t even start. As in, nothing at all happens when I push the power button; it won’t even get to BiOS, so I’m pretty sure that it’s not an issue with trying to boot from a volume with no operating system.

The same hard drives work when I used them in a powered USB enclosure. They’re slow, because it’s over USB, but they work.

I think my power supply is 800W. My gut feeling is that my power supply is insufficient for the added power draw of a traditional hard drive. Does this sound correct?

  • Steve
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    18 hours ago

    If the machine won’t power up at all, it’s almost certainly something in the power system.

    Since it works in a USB dock, the drive itself is probably fine. I’d check different spots on the SATA power cable, or a different cable altogether. Different spots to plug in the cable on the PSU.

    I’d bet it’s a bad SATA power cable.

    • HelixDab2@lemm.eeOP
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      18 hours ago

      I’ll give those a try, along with adding up my voltage totals.

      This would probably be faster and easier on everyone if I had photos and make/models. :)