This device won’t start.
This device won’t start.
I discovered a moldy PC inside a storage unit in New Mexico. I swapped the old battery for a fresh 2032 and added an SATA hard drive. The original HDD was a 7200RPM IDE model. Someone asked me to bring back that drive, but they wanted me to leave the rest of the system behind because they thought it was worthless. There were plenty of cables in the cluttered space to hook up an 80GB SATA 3.5-inch drive running Windows XP. After connecting everything and turning it on, nothing worked.
These images are very unclear, making it hard to assess what we're dealing with. It might be the power supply, possibly affected by mold or other harm that rendered it unusable. Use a multimeter to check the connections for any voltage.
There should be an on/off switch on the back of the PSU. Toggle it, and make sure it is in the ON position. Make sure the power cable is plugged in tightly to the PSU and into the wall socket and not a power strip. Check your cables from the PSU are plugged into the motherboard tightly and correctly. If you press the Power button on the front of the PC and nothing happens, no fans spin, no lights. Then it is most likely the PSU needs to be replaced. It may be the power switch has failed, but not likely, you can test this with a screw driver touching the on pins.
Switched the power source on and after checking the issue, I realized the main power unit was nonfunctional. Locate a typical ATX unit with IDE ports for the dual hard drives. The machine in question is a Compaq Presario SR1803WM.
It's not ideal. It's a Molex. Most components retain that. Of course, avoid buying extremely inexpensive PSUs—they're just as likely to cause issues as they are to work properly.