Dell XPS 410 Failure

***IF I POSTED IN WRONG FORUM, TELL ME PLEASE :)***

Ok so i'm going to get straight in to it :)!

My Dell XPS 410 finally hit the dead zone, or did it?

So, one day i was fixing my friends laptop, and when i connected his Hard drive through my SATA/IDE to USB bridge, my whole PC just went dead!(shut off and would not boot anymore, saying the HDD was dead) Well, I was MAD like about to RAGE MAD ! The reason i was so mad was because I had a crap-ton of important stuff, well, important to me anyway. So a few days flew by, and i wondered to myself, 'Do the Hard drives even work still?' So i got out me SATA to USB bridge and connected it to my other desktop, and what do you know, It works. So i got my stuff off the HDD.

ANYWAY: My point is, my Dell XPS 410 is REFUSING to boot into ANY HDD with ANY OS. I have at least tried 6 HDD's and it wont work. I would LOVE to use this desktop again, simply because i have a video card i use for Dual monitors, and the only other pc i have is my Dell Dimension C521, which is a SFF tower. Thats just the problem. none of my hardware in the XPS is compatible with the C521.

If you need any more info, let me know.

Hi Golden. Unfortunately, I am not at home right now so I will have to check later.

However, I'm assuming that it does recognize the HDD becuase it tells me that there is a "communication error" with the HDD.

TVeblen said:

Here is a guess: Power Supply.

If the PC just blinked out the moment you connected an additional hard drive to the power supply then that would be the best clue.

If the PC just blinked out the moment you connected an additional hard drive to the SATA cable, then that could be something else.

Can you get your hands on a power supply you can borrow just to test?

Another thought: some supplies have overload protection. To reset, turn off the supply with it's power switch, unplug the power cord, then press and hold the case power button for about 30 seconds or so.

Although this is a great suggestion, the external drive had its own PSU

TVeblen said:

Oh. Good to know that this is an external drive.

So why the SATA/IDE bridge? Never heard of one of those. Why aren't you just using a USB port?
Me thinks you need to explain this setup so we can "see" it.

Ok will do. Just give me a few minutes.

Ok, so now i have everything fixed, but the HDD wont spin up. i REALLY dont have the money to buy another 500GB SATA HDD...