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Will there be enough power? (PC problem)

UnderdogUnderdog Registered User regular
edited April 2010 in Help / Advice Forum
So my brother's computer has bonked and he's sort of at a loss at what to do with it. He suspects it's a virus and he tried to format the hd but it got halted mid process. I'm thinking of hooking his hd up to my pc and just formatting it through my hd. I am wondering about the power issues though. How much power do harddrives use? My pc has one hd, an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS and one fan right above my processor. Oh the processor is an Intel Core 2 E6300. The mother board is an Asus p5b if that makes any difference. I'll unplug my dvd and cd drives before connecting. Haven't a clue how to check what my power supply is though. Doesn't seem to say anywhere on the power supply.

Am I just being too cautious? I had a problem with my power supply once and it fried my motherboard so I'm a bit skittish I guess.

Underdog on

Posts

  • InfidelInfidel Heretic Registered User regular
    edited April 2010
    You won't run into any power issues just adding a drive to that system. You're already pretty light, if it makes you feel better though it doesn't hurt to unplug the unnecessary dvd drives like you mentioned if you aren't needing them for this temporary thing.

    You might want to use something low level (like a bootable utility or linux live cd) to format his drive so that you don't infect your own system doing this though.

    Infidel on
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  • EskimoDaveEskimoDave Registered User regular
    edited April 2010
    It will say on your PSU what it's rating is unless you ripped the stickers off. You may need to unscrew it to read it though.

    EskimoDave on
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  • UnderdogUnderdog Registered User regular
    edited April 2010
    Infidel wrote: »
    You won't run into any power issues just adding a drive to that system. You're already pretty light, if it makes you feel better though it doesn't hurt to unplug the unnecessary dvd drives like you mentioned if you aren't needing them for this temporary thing.

    You might want to use something low level (like a bootable utility or linux live cd) to format his drive so that you don't infect your own system doing this though.

    Hmm I hadn't considered the possibility of infecting my own computer. I have no idea what a bootable utility or linux live cd is though. Maybe I shouldn't fiddle with this after all.

    Underdog on
  • InfidelInfidel Heretic Registered User regular
    edited April 2010
    Underdog wrote: »
    Infidel wrote: »
    You won't run into any power issues just adding a drive to that system. You're already pretty light, if it makes you feel better though it doesn't hurt to unplug the unnecessary dvd drives like you mentioned if you aren't needing them for this temporary thing.

    You might want to use something low level (like a bootable utility or linux live cd) to format his drive so that you don't infect your own system doing this though.

    Hmm I hadn't considered the possibility of infecting my own computer. I have no idea what a bootable utility or linux live cd is though. Maybe I shouldn't fiddle with this after all.

    A live linux cd is a bootable cd that gets you into a linux desktop without having to install anything on your system. Let's you boot up linux and work with it, or install linux permanently.

    For example here is Ubuntu's version.

    Basically you would download and burn this cd, then boot from it on your friends machine. No hardware to swap around, you'll get a linux desktop where you can use gparted (the disk partition tool) to do whatever you need to.

    Infidel on
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