A new method based on principal component analysis (PCA) and support vector machines (SVMs) is proposed for fault diagnosis of mine hoists. PCA is used to extract the principal features associated with the gearbox. Then, with the irrelevant gearbox variables removed, the remaining gearbox, the hydraulic system and the wire rope parameters were used as input to a multi-class SVM. The SVM is first trained by using the one class-based multi-class optimization algorithm and it is then applied to fault identification. Comparison of various methods showed the PCA-SVM method successfully removed redundancy to solve the dimensionality curse. These results show that the algorithm using the RBF kernel function for the SVM had the best classification properties.