Your "audible message saying "my hard disk has had a problem" "
has probably got nothing to do with the capacity of the PS. If the system came with that 300 watt PS, it's probably fine.
I've been told by someone who makes a living building custom generic systems you don't ever need more than 350 watts for a system with a mboard that has no PCI-E slots, unless it is a server, and 300 watts, or less, is often fine.
Check your data cables. The following also applies to scsi and floppy drive data cables:
It is common to un-intentionally damage IDE data cables, especially while removing them - the 80 wire ones are more fragile. What usually happens is the cable is ripped at either edge and the wires there are either damaged or severed, often right at a connector or under it's cable clamp there, where it's hard to see - if a wire is severed but it's ends are touching, the connection is intermittant.
Another common thing is for the data cable to be separated from the connector contacts a bit after you have removed a cable - there should be no gap between the data cable and the connector - if there is press the cable against the connector to eliminate the gap.
Check your hard drives with the manufacturer's diagnostics.
See the latter part of response 1 in this:
http://www.computing.net/windows95/...
If you don't have a floppy drive, you can get a CD image diagnostic utility from most hard drive manufacturer's web sites, but obviously you would need to make a burned CD, preferably a CD-R for best compatibilty, on another computer if you need to.
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Hard drives draw very little power - see for yourself - read the voltage/amperage specs on the drive's label, or on the manufacturer's web site for the model.
The lion's share of the PS capacity is required for your mboard, cpu, and ram.
Hard drives draw the max power when they first spin up as you boot - the rest of the time they draw a lot less.
Most if not all hard drive controllers automatically step the starting up of the drives timimg wise slightly so multiple drives don't all spin up at exactly the same time, and so that they are more easily reliably detected by the bios.
Some bioses, of a mboard with onboard drive controllers, or of a drive controller card, may have a problem detecting some hard drives reliably while booting, especially on faster computers. Some bioses have a setting to delay booting a drive in the bios Setup settings so that the drive can be reliably detected. E.g. I have a Gigabyte 7ZMMH mboard that has to have a delay set in the mboard bios for certain IDE hard drives. The SCSI controller Delay Start jumper probably serves the same purpose - you could try enabling that, if you can determine the drive the message is about is a SCSI one.
It won't hurt to try that in any case.
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If the PS is the AOpen brand I've found them to be very, very reliable.
However, any PS can become defective.
Failing power supplies are common.
Check your PS.
See response 4 in this:
http://www.computing.net/hardware/w...
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If you can determine the drive the message is about is a SCSI one, and nothing you try helps, if the SCSI card is old you may need to get a newer one.
