hard drive swap to different chassis...

good morning,
i have a pair of dell xps 200's circa 2006. up until yesterday, everything was fine. and then one of them shut off. the error message said " thermal event" so i figure the fan has stopped. i whip the thing apart poke at the fan, it starts but its filth so i do a little mainainence... clean everything, fresh thermal grease under the heat sink etc...

plug it back in, fire it up and everything is great for 40 mins and then it does it again and no amount of anything makes it come back. hit the switch, fan starts for a second or two, boot starts and then stops and shut down.

so... i take the fan and heat sink out of the other working unit and swap everything. second unit works fine with all the parts from the first dead unit and first dead unit still won't start.

so... i take and swap the hard drives and drives both function perfectly in the ' good chassis"

so... at this point im screwed. i need two operational systems and i don't have time to go hunting for motherboards or giving this box to a repair guy so he can charge me 200 bucks and give it back to me worse than when i gave it to him.

first question... i am happy to entertain any suggesstions as to what you might think is wrong with the bad box that i can take a whack at.

second question... this box has a sata 80 gig hard drive. it works fine . can i consider this hard drive " generic" ? that is to say... if i buy a new computer that ISN'T a dell xps 200 but has a sata drive, can i just swap the drives out and the new computer simply becomes my old one ?

i don't have the time or inclination to go thru the whole deal of set up and reconfiguration and swapping everything over... i would just like to have a new chassis that i can plug this hard drive into and have it work.

is there any magic to this ?

steve

could be the power supply.
did you try switching them out?

no. without any real direction , i didn't want to rattle the good system apart any further. seemed to me that if it was the power supply, i wouldn't get the " thermal event" error message. but i don't know enough about it to make any sort of educated guess.

some power supplies have a thermal sensor circuit in them that is read by the system. Not sure about dell.
That could be the thermal event you are seeing.
You didn't say you cleaned the supply?
That could be the source of the error.
If the cpu heat sink was dirty, them ps unit probably is as well.
Just something quick and simple to try.
Blow out the ps and give it a go.

that explanation makes sense and ill try it today. thanks.