GA EP45-DS3R turns itself off at midnight

[rashley]

I built it 2 days ago with a Zalman 600W power aupply. The first night it shut itself off and the next morning wouldn't respond to the power switch. I took the cover off and found what I thought might be a loose power cable. I turned it on again and it booted fine and ran all day. Last night the same thing happened. This morning I had to take the cover off and reseat a power connector before I could turn it back on. I checked the logs and found that the last -- MARK -- was just before midnight both nights.

It seems that it is automatically shuting itself off and the failsafe on the power supply won't let me turn it back on from the front panel.

I have done a fair bit of looking around this morning and it would appear that this problem is unique. So I went from a long time lurker on this forum to a registered user to find out if anyone has any idea about how to prevent this from happening. I usually run cron backups during the night and really want to keep this machine on all the time.

[bridgman]

I haven't seen this very often, but each time it turned out to be a power glitch caused by other equipment (furnace, heaters, air conditioner, well pump etc..) tripping the power control circuitry in the P/S.

[rashley]

Yeah but it seems to me that toggling the power switch on the back of the PS would reset it. Then I could turn the machine on from the front panel as normal. But that is not the case, I had to open the unit and reseat a power cable.

It's possible that we have a slight power glitch sometime during the night but unlikely that it would occur at midnight every night.

It might be a fault in the Power Save feature of the MB. In the BIOS there is an option to turn the machine on a user setable alarm. I'll turn the machine off tonight and set it to power up in the early morning.

[rashley]

It might be a fault in the Power Save feature of the MB. In the BIOS there is an option to turn the machine on a user setable alarm. I'll turn the machine off tonight and set it to power up in the early morning.

Well, that didn't work.

Tonight I'll hook it up to a UPS. If that doesn't work, it's not a glitch in our power.

[rashley]

Thanks Bridgman.

The UPS experiment worked. Whatever power glitch that occurs in the middle of the night around here isn't enough to reset clocks in the house but apparently is enough for my new power supply to kick into failsafe. Weird.

Anyway my new system is fast, digital audio out works and the thing is almost totally silent. Case closed.

[deanjo]

Heh, I remember a case like that. A guy that kept making warranty claims on his mac for fried power supplies was finally asked one day does he have any other electrical issues. In a span of a year he went through 2 TV's, 3 refrigerators 2 stoves and many other electronics but it never occured to him that his wiring may be faulty.