Book Chapter 7 - Power Supplies

6. Troubleshooting Core Components

Okay, so in this episode, what we want to talk about is troubleshooting core components. The CompTIA A+ exam has a number of objectives that have problems with RAM, CPU, motherboard, power supply,that you really can't deal with any one of those without having everybody else on board and connected. And what we're looking at right here in real time is a perfect example of where I have a brand new motherboard, brand new RAM, brand new CPU, brand new video card, and nothing else. I have no hard drives, no optical media. There are no thumb drives plugged in. I got a mouse and a monitor. And basically, in this episode, we're going to talk about the problems that we ran into with the core components. So now that everybody's buckled together, this is always a great, I hope it works moment because you're panicstricken that you've plugged something in wrong. So we're going to go ahead. We'll give this a try. Lights by themselves mean nothing. I watch the system boot up. Look at all these pretty colours I got in here. And what I'm doing right now is staring at the monitor, waiting for bias to appear hazard.I've got a system booting up. Now during the boot, I have no hard drive. So it's going to boot up and then it's going to reach a point. It's going to go well. There's no boot device present. This big error shows up. That's the greatest thing there is. That tells me that I have installed the CPU,the RAM video, and got a keyboard and mouse working. All I need to do at this point is start putting in some mass storage. So this is a big first step. So let's talk about problems that you run into. The only truly terrifying issue The only one that really terrifies me at this stage in the game is the messed up CPU. So when I'm installing that CPU,we cover that in other episodes. But when I install that CPU, my myparanoia level is like at Mach seven. I'm using anti-static protection. I'm remounting the CPU five or six times. If I'm dry seeding it and looking at it, I'm making sure I'm using good thermaldope between the CPU and my cooling system. I buckle that in and you always make sure that the fan, or if it's liquid cooling or liquidcooling, you plug in the pump or the fan before you ever try to boot anything up. So just the fact that my fan is spinning and I've got these pretty colours tells me, at least in that aspect, I'm looking pretty good. The second most worrisome thing, and this is less worrisome, but still a concern, is the Ram itself. It is so easy, especially on today's complex systems. When you're looking at a motherboard book like this and all of a sudden it says, "Oh, you have to put in Dim slots one A and two B" and it's like, "is that to be or not to be?" Oh, I've been waiting for an hour to throw that joke in. Sorry. Okay, But it's very, very easy to put Ram in the wrong place. And the first time you attempt to make a boot, you'll probably get a scary beep code. You most likely inserted the ram incorrectly. It happens all the time. The other thing to watch out for is with the videothing that we have with a lot of CPUs these days. We actually call them at least AMD and some APUs, but only if they have built-in graphics. So in the Intel Wealth CPUs, some of them have built-in graphics and some of them don't. In the AMD world, it's a CPU, unless it has built-in graphics, then it's an APU. Now, this can be a real trick, especially for AMD processors. For example, I have a rising CPU here. It doesn't have built-in graphics, but the motherboard itself has a connection for it. And that's because this motherboard supports lots of different AMD processors, some with graphics, some without. If I put this in a room that had the built-in graphics, this connector right here on the motherboard would work. But this one doesn't, because I like to put in my own big graphics cards. So that is often a challenge for people to let go, "Oh, there's an HDMI connector." Why isn't my video coming on? Well, it's because you have a CPU that doesn't have built-in graphics, so it's a little glitch that catches so many techs, including me. So the big issue for me when it comes to graphics is that they have to have some kind of graphics just to boot the system up. Now, In this particular case, I've got a very high-end card in here. But a lot of the time when I'm building systems up I've got an ancient old PCIe video card that I slapped in. And I'll just use that just to get the system up. To see the original setup to make sure I'm in good order and to make sure everything is working the way I wanted it to. Assuming that all works, and assuming you've plugged in the power properly, which is so easy to forget, you should get a good boot, and you should come in and see your system set up. But as we often know, that's not necessarily the case. On an initial assembly, you run into certain situations that will always drive you absolutely bananas. Now, in other episodes, we cover things like different types of posterior code. So I don't want to repeat that here. But the one thing I do want to mention is that you'll fire the system up. It's not making any noise, nothing's showing up on the screen. The fans are turning, but nobody's home in that type of situation. This covers a broad cross section of problems, and I fix them all in one simple way. I start over, like from the beginning. It is trivially easy to forget to plug in the power connection and that could cause a situation to take place. It is trivially easy to snap Ram in the wrong position, and that can cause it. It's so simple to not seat a CPU all the way in, and that can cause that type of situation. If the fans are turning and nobody's home and it's your initial setup, just reassemble the whole thing. A lot of techs really love it, especially when they get a new case. They want to plug in every USB connection, every front panel connection, and all that type of stuff. I aggressively disagree with that. The first time I put something together,I didn't even bother with the case. I did this because you know a bit. But normally I'll be putting that motherboard just on a table on some anti-static mat. I'll get the CPU on there. I'll have some power supply labour and get it plugged in. I'll use that old cheap graphics card, plug it into a monitor, and just see if the system boots up. There is no more painful feeling on earth than having a system that won't boot up and having to take everything apart as you're doing a reassembly. So it's your personal call on that. Another thing that's often handy to have around is one of these little speakers. The problem with these speakers is that a lot of systems are starting to not use them, and I'd like to keep some of these around. You can pick these up anywhere, and you can make sure that you have some kind of speaker output, especially when you're dealing with posts. I'll set this off to the side for now, so that's the first big one. Now another problem that we run into is lockups. In this particular case, throughout this course we're going to be talking about system lockups all over the place. But in particular, I want to talk about system lockups that take place while you have just your core components. If your system locks up, you've probably made a stupid, simple mistake that we all make. One of the big ones that make a mistake is that they get their initial set up going,they're really happy with it, and all of a sudden they want to start messing with bands. Or they go into the system set up and it's like, whoo, look at all these cool featuresand options or where they decide to put in a user password and they forget it. Look, we've all done it. It's okay. You made a serious mistake, saved it, and now you don't know how to get out of it. Don't worry. What we do in that situation is on every motherboard. Somewhere is a clear, seamless jumper. Let's see if I can find it here. See that little jumper? Those little two posts sticking out are a clear seamless jumper. The function of the clear seamoss jumper is to make all of your sins go away. All you need to do is cut those two little poses. Now you can actually have a little thing called a shit, but honestly, just a pair of car keys that short between those two. Just hold that car key. Don't bend it like a pair of pliers, but just touch each of those posts for about 30 seconds and it will literally erase everything that you did. All the passwords that you put in or some weird RAM setting that you shouldn't have messed with. It makes them all go away and brings your system set up back to its original defaults. Go right back in and try it one more time. Now noise is seen and on a core system, there's not that many moving parts to make noise. You can make noise if you want. This is probably the most common one of getting caught in fans. If you're going to be getting a loud noise, odds are good you've got a piece of cable stuck in a fan or you've got something in there, it's a matter of going in. It's probably not going to break anything. Don't panic, but get in there, find out where it is, and reroute that piece of cable or that stick or whatever you have. And that loud noise is going to go away. The other place where a loud noise might take place is in the power supply itself. Watching a large capacitor explode is a very, very noteworthy event. And as long as you're with that, you'll get some other stuff too. But the bottom line is that loud noise will be obvious where it's coming from if it comes from the power supply. Okay, Now the next thing is that whenever you're having a problem with your corecomponent, most smothered boards today come with all kinds of really handy indicator lights. Of course, your front panel lights up. For example, usually the on button lights up. These days, that can be convenient. What is more interesting are the many, many kinds of LEDs that you see on a motherboard. So let's see if we can find a few on here. So you see these two red LEDs right here? These things are amazingly convenient. They basically tell you that the system recognises that you have sticks of ram snapped into those two particular connectors. I can't tell you how many times I've actually tried to snap in a stick of ram and just was wrong. What a handy little convenience to have something like that. Most motherboards will have an onboard power supply. If you have power plugged into the motherboard, you don't have the system on. The system can be completely turned off, but there'll be a little light that says, "Look, I know there's power plugged in and if you try to turn me on, I'm ready to rock and roll." There is no standardisation on these indicator lights, and every motherboard is a little bit different on there. Take some time and dig around on your mother board. Make sure you know with all these different lights. Mine are all red. You could be on yours. But take some time to understand what they're all there for. They can really, really save you when it comes to troubleshooting core components. The other big thing to watch more than anything else is on your own. A lot of times, the system is going to boot up and everything looks good and you're in your system setup. But there could be a problem with RAM that you're not paying attention to. On this particular system, I've got six gigs of Ram on two eight-gig sticks. What I can do is, in my system setup,I can actually chat and see if it's there. Let's take a look. Whoa. I've got 32 gigs of RAM. Whoops. I've got 216 gig sticks in here. Sorry about that. So the important thing here is that by looking at this, I know how much RAM is in my system. It's really easy, especially on an initial build,to put yourself in a situation where you don't necessarily know that all your RAM is there. The other problem you can run into with RAM is that it's possible to put in bad sticks of RAM and then suddenly discover later, after you've installed an operating system, that you've got bad RAM. In that situation, you're going to have to use some kind of memory checking program. All operating systems have this. And what you can actually do is actually what's known as a live CD or a live drive. You can boot into that operating system. You're not installing it. You're just booting to Windows, and it allows you to boot Windows up. In windows They call it the Windows Recovery Environment, or WRE. I've got an entire episode covering how to use that. One of the features in Windows is a memory diagnostic that runs through and checks your memory memory.It could be a very, very handy tool if you think you've got a bad stick of Ram. You cannot count on just the fact that your system sees it as a guarantee. That's the ram.

Book Chapter 8 - Mass Storage Technologies

1. Introduction to Mass Storage

What I've got in front of me is all kinds of storage devices. Storage, mass storage. We can use those terms interchangeably. Look, the bottom line is that your computer uses lots of data. You store huge videos, you save great, big games. You've got big systems that need a lot of storage space. And that's what all these different devices are for. Now, when we talk about all these different devices, there's all kinds of different technology. We have things like optical media. We have things like old school hard drives that spin. We have solid state drives that are popular these days. But the bottom line is that it doesn't matter what these devices are. They've all got some minimum storage space, or anatom, the smallest amount of storage they can handle, and they're all divided into these. Like with hard drives, there can be something called a sector, which could be 512 bytes or 4096 bytes. With SSDs, we use something called "blocks," which can be around 10 bits. With optical media, we use tracks that can be somewhere around a little over a thousand bytes. The problem is that all storage devices,without exception, are bazillions of some kind of atom that varies between the different technologies. What ties all this together and the way your computer looks at all these devices is something called LBA. How that works We've got hard drives. We've got these things called SSDs. We've got optical media. All of these things are nothing more than the storage of hundreds of thousands of individual atoms. What ties them all together is something called logical block addressing. Let me show you how that works. So if we take a look at an old school hard drive, inside that hard drive are zillions of these sectors, and each sector stores about 40 96 bytes of data. Logical block addressing is nothing more than some control circuitry. It's a little bit of hardware and with a little help of software that acts as an interface between your operating system and all your different storage devices. If your operating system needs to save a file, what it's going to do is it's going to go up to the counter of LBA, and it's going to say, I want to save this big file, blah, blah, blah MP4. And the LBA person is then going to go ahead and take it. and here to allocate blocks. Now, on this hard drive right here,it's about a four-terabyte hard drive. So its blocks are broken up into 4006-piece chunks. Each block is around 4096 bytes. And because it's a big drive, it goes from aboutzero all the way to almost 1 billion blocks. So your operating system just says, here's the file,but it's your LBA that actually allocates however many blocks are necessary to save that much. MP4. The cool part about LBA is that, in essence, it's the device driver for all the different types of SOCs on our system. When you install hard drives, you install optical media. In extremely rare cases, you may not need to install a device driver because LBA is built into all operating systems. All mass storage devices are pretty much plugged in the right way, and you make sure that your bias understands that it's there. They basically just want you to remember that as we progress through the episodes, all you have to do is plug in mass storage, make sure it worksa bias, and the operating systems will detect it automatically. That is not to say we might not want to do a few more things. They'll be there. And that's the important point. Now, the other issue we run into with mass storage is the concept of capacity. We live in a world where we count with really big numbers. And I'm pretty sure most folks have heard of terms like megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, and that type of thing. But the challenge we run into is that there are two ways to count to a million: a billion and a trillion. Let's start by counting the more classical set in base ten mathematics. We count in terms of zero through nine, and then when we get to nine, we add a zero at the end and make tens or hundred or thousands. So I'm going to start off with a sample value, and that is going to be 10. So when you see 1000, we call that a kilo. This is just a number; it's not an actual unit. Now, when we're talking about memory and things like that, if we have 1000 kw, that's equal to a million and we call that a mega. If we have 1000 megas, we call that a giga. And if we have 1000 gigas but no aterra, well, let's just keep going for fun. PETA stands for petagram. And 1000 petas, which would equal a really big number, is an exa. When we're counting quantities in base ten mathematics, the numbers that you and I love, these gigas and petas and eggs are an easy way for us to manifest very, very large values. However, these values are great for things like how many blocks are on a storage device. And it's great if I've got a whole lot of bananas to save. But we run into a big problem when we're counting in binary. Let me show you what I mean. In my CPU videos in this series, I talk about something called a man in the CPU, and we also talk about something called an external data bus, which is nothing more than eight light bulbs with eight light switches on the inside and outside of the enclosure. The beautiful part about the external data bus is that it provides us with a communication medium. However, there's something we're always interested in: how many different patterns are there? And therefore, by knowing the number of words, we get to know how many different things we can say to somebody. So, for example, if I've got eightwires, the math is actually pretty straightforward. We use something that's two to three. Trust me when I tell you this. And that value is equal to 256 different patterns. So in a binary world, we're always interested in the number of different patterns. For example, if I've got an address, I want my CPU to be able to talk to Ram. And this address bus has, for this particular example,ten wires on it. We have two to the tenth, or 1024 different patterns between ten zeros and ten ones, and all the different combinations in between. In fact, this becomes so important that we bring binary counts into values. Like, for example, start here. So we have two to the 10th,which traditionally was called a kilo. But because people were confusing that with the number 1000, we instead used the value kibbe. A kilo is a thousand, kibby istwo to the 10th power, or 1024. So let's make this go away for a moment. Now we can keep counting like this. So two to the 10th is equal to kibbe. Two to the 20th is a nebby, two to the 30th is a gibby. A Tebby is two to the 40th, a Pebby is two to the 50th, and an Eggsby is two to the 60th. So we literally have two numbering systems. And here's the big challenge. These guys tend to have a set of similar So a kilo is pretty close to a kibbee, andomega is pretty close to a mebi. So we'll just do this one really quickly. So omega is a million. A mebi is 1,000,048 576.It's pretty close. And the problem keeps going here. So if we count out a full giga and compare that to a gibby, you'll see these numbers are very, very close. So let's go ahead and put both sets of values up. So here on the left are going to be our decimal values, and here on the right, we actually call these IEC values. When you say kibby and mebi and stuff like that, you see that they kind of bring up fairly similar values. The whole challenge behind decimal versus IEC counting is that in our industry we can use both values and we run into trouble. For example, if you install a four-terabyte hard drive on your computer, the people who sell you the drive are doing that four terabytes in decimal values. But when you plug in a computer, your computer is interested in LBA values, which are binary. And then the end result is, when you query your computer and say how much capacity I have, it's going to give you a slightly different value. It's not like some of your hard drive magically disappears here, folks. It's just that hard drive manufacturers count one way and operating systems, when they're talking about the drive count in a different way. So you're going to see this variance all the time when we're dealing with mass storage. Don't worry about it. It's just different ways of counting. OK, now the last thing I want to talk about as we dip our toe into mass storageis I want to talk about physical sizes. We've got plenty of other episodes that we're talking about, how we plug them in and all that. And this little piece. I just want to make sure you're comfortable with the size. So let's start with this right here. This is optical media, and this is what we call a five and a quarter inch. five and a quarter inches across Five and a quarter inch formats have been around since literally before peas were invented and we still use them for pretty much all optical media and that's about it. I'm sure there's something else I'm thinking of. The next step down from that is three and a half. So this is three and a half inches across. For many, many decades, three and a half have been the dominant form of mass storage. It's still out there in big order. really, really high-capacity hard drives. For example, We'll use this size. We see it out there all the time. Next is the half. So that's two and a half inches across here. This size was originally mainly for laptops and mobile devices, but today it's become so popular because we can pack so many of them together that you'll see two and a half inch format storage devices even in big server systems. The last one I want to mention is number eight. This did not get a lot of traction, but it's out there. The One-eight format was very popular with SSDs,but unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, something else came along and totally unseeded it. M Two is the dominant format for solid-state devices on most systems today. Like I said, we're going to have plenty of other episodes where we're going to drill into all of these devices a lot deeper. But as our initial takeaway, number one, understand that we have this thing called LBA, so no matter what we plug into our computers, we don't have to deal with device drivers or anything. Your system's going to see it if they're plugged in right. It works for every operating system. Number two, we have to deal with capacities. We live in a world right now where we have competition between classic metric-based ten counties and binary counties, and it can fool you if you suddenly plug something in and then something else looks at it and gives you a slightly different value. It's okay. It's just different ways of counting. And the last thing I want to make sure you're comfortable with are these formats as we go, these different types of storage. You're going to be seeing these sizes over and over again. Be comfortable with that.

2. Magnetic Disk Drives

This, my friends, is the inner workings of a classic hard disc drive. These big round, shiny things you're looking at are platters. And while you can't see it, they actually store ones and zeros, little teeny-tiny bits of magnetism, incredibly small. We read this and if I give it a little bit, you can actually see this happen by this little arm that's going to go back and forth. My arm is going back and forth. It is within nanometers of contact, but it isn't actually touching the platters themselves. So that little ReadWrite head picks up the one or two andzeros and sets them down depending on where your needs are. Now you can't see this because you can't see magnetism. But if you could see magnetism, you'd see that it's stored in the little atom. The smallest thing we can store is what we call a sector. And it would look something like this. Hard disc drives have been around for ages. And one of the things that's challenging is that they've gone through a lot of different iterations and shapes and sizes. So let's at least get the idea of physicals out of the way. So if you take a look right here,you'll see I've got two hard disc drives. By the way, you see the term "HDD" used a lot. Remember, a hard disc drive has to have suspending on the inside. So if you take a look even at this two and a half inch, you'll see there's a little motor there and then you have little tiny platters as well. There's even a smaller size one.Eight physical-size drives I can't find one. I want one. If you know where one is, contact me. I'll be away from you. Okay? So, in terms of physical size, three and a half and two and a half are your big sizes. Back in the early days when these came out, they would have capacities as low as maybe 20 megabytes. Today, single hard drives can have capacities in excess of 16 terabytes. So that just gives you an idea of how long this particular type of drive has been around. Now, if we're going to talk toy, we need to have a language. If we want to talk to the guy at the gate, we need to speak LBA's language. To do that, we first of all have a number of terms we have to get clear on. This term is the language itself. The language is called Advanced Technology Attachment or the Original Hard District. I've spoken this language and the latest ones that we can go out to the storm in still speak this language. However, the physical interface has changed. The original Parallel Ata or Pada, which is long dead, is not on the exam and will never be seen on the system unless you work with very old computers. What we do see today is something called "serial Ata" or "SATA." So let me give you some examples of SATA. Right here we can do this on the two and a half inch drive. These little connectors are SATA connectors. Interestingly enough, this larger connector is the power connector and this smaller connector is the data connector. So if you want to use this drive, you're going to have to give it electricity and then you're going to have to plug it into the computer itself. So let's go ahead and just plug in the power part. So I've got a power cord right here and you can see it's got a little tiny L key on the right and I just plugged it in and now successfully plugged in the power. On the data side, here's an example of a static cable. The static cable has just one connection on each end, and it's got a little L connector. And for me to plug this guy in now, everything is plugged in on the hard drive side. Well, that's only half of the equation. All we've got to do is get this plugged into the motherboard. Pretty much all motherboards today have built-in SATA controllers. If you need to, you can actually buy an expansion card and get more SATA. But right now, pretty much any motherboard you're going to want is going to have SATA built right in. Let me show you what we're doing on this motherboard right here. You'll see I've got six white SATAconnectors and then a blue one. The extra connector is... well, I'm going to have to check the motherboard book. I'm not sure why it's there. It's probably just a 7th connector. Anyway, the bottom line is that I can plug into any one of these. This has a handy little 90-degree angle that a lot of people like to use. They're not required. What I can do here is let's get this all pretty and you can see that I'm plugged in to the motherboard and the cable comes over into the drive and then we have power. That's all there is to the physical connectivity of this type of drive. They're really, really easy to use, and they're a lot of fun. In fact, SATA was so popular a few years ago that they came up with an aversion of SATA that's designed for external devices. There's nothing in here but a bunch of SATA drives, and they're interfaced together through a little connector known as eSATA. Let me show you how this works. So on this motherboard right here, if you take a look, this is an eSATA connection. It's just a SATA connection, but it's designed to be externally. It has a special cable. It's a little more reinforced, a little more grounded. And let me go and plug in here. I've got that plugged in and then I take whatever device I'm using and I can plug it in there. And if we look at this, I've now plugged in an external device. ESAT is on the exam. But do be aware that because of great advancements in the last few years with USB,ESADA has kind of taken a backseat. So for a lot of people, they don't use eSATA anymore, except for people like me. Because I've got this wonderful eSATAexternal drive, I still need it. So what I'm going to do is go buy something like this. And this is just an eSATA expansion card. The nice part about our card is that I can just snap it into a motherboard,a more modern motherboard that doesn't have eSATA. And I will still continue to use my favourite external eSATA storage device, even though my new mother doesn't support Esatta anymore. Okay, if you've plugged everything in the right way, all you need to do at this point is boot your computer up and go into your system setup. And that hard drive should be visible. So I'm going to go and take a minute and get this white box up and cooking, and I'm going to plug in one of these SATA drives, and I'll meet you in system setup. Okay? Man, I'll tell you, today's modern systems, with all their extra lighting and all that, make it a lot harder than a hard drive than it used to be. All right, anyway, so it's physically plugged in and I've gone ahead and booted up the system. So let's go ahead and take a look at the system set up and see that hard drive. Now that I've booted into my system setup, I'm going to have to try to find where the hard drives are located. Every one of these system setups is different. On this one, I'm going to look under boot,and I can see right here that it's setplugged into port number six, which is WDC. That is Western Digital. Just because I've read a lot of these, here's the actual model number itself. The fact that it shows up in my system setup says that I have done everything physically correct. This drive is installed. There's nothing else that I have to do in terms of plugging or connecting. All we're going to have to do now is boot into an operating system and go ahead and set it up so that the operating system itself can use it. So, good job.

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