PC won't turn on

[JCrou82]

A friend of mine who is currently in Iraq built his own machine. It's been running for about 6 months or more. His mother uses it to email him. I will give as much specifics as I can about the machine.

He has a pentium 4 processor, a cd-RW drive, a dvd-RW, a harddrive, a floppy drive, a fire wire card. On board NIC, PS2 and usb ports. a video card and about 5 fans or so. he also has a digital temperature sensor. all of these things are powered by a 500W, 220W Max Power supply.

a couple of weeks ago, she had called me stating that the computer won't turn on. When I get to her house, the only thing that worked was the temperature reader. Nothing else would come on. I then thought that it was a bad power supply thinking that since it's been rainy weather she had gotten a small surge or spike, although the unit is on a surge protector and none of her other electronics show signs of a spike/surge. My friend then ordered a replacement power supply, because I wasn't sure where he had gotten the first one from. I then replaced the power supply with the new one, a 400W power supply, yesterday. as soon as I plugged everything in to the power supply I then plugged the power cord into the power supply and the fans come on quickly and then died out. I thought then that maybe there was too many components sucking up all of the power so i unplugged all of the fans and still the pc won't turn on.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
Could I have blown the new power supply?
Is there something else in the pc that isn't allowing it to turn on?
I've heard that sometimes you can get a surge/spike from NIC and that could have fried either the MB or the Processor. Is this true?

thanks guys

 

[paparazi]

JCrou82
Disconnect everything apart from the bare minimum (CPU/heatsink/fan, 1 stick of memory, graphics card, PSU)
I suspect a card, Cdrom or hard drive has gone to ground after the original PSU blew (special attention to HDD)
If it now posts try reconnecting things one at a time.
Replace the power lead, check the main power plug to motherboard connection for burning.
Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[dukbtr]

Have you tried a different surge protector or outlet? I had a friend with a similar situation and we tried a different surge protector and everything worked. It turned out that the surge protector was tripped or the fuse had blown, but not all the way and that was the problem.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
dukbtr

 

[JCrou82]

Just as an update.

I had a friend of mine come with me with two different testers, one for the power supply and one for the mother board. I'm apologize but I don't remember the true name for them. In any event, both power supplies seemed to have tested fine, but only the new supply had a functioning fan.

We then used the MB tester and replaced each component piece by piece, reviewing the code's given to us by the MB tester. We also made sure we turned the machine on and off for each replaced component. Finally we had replaced everything and the machine booted up into Windows with no problems. so the machine works, although i'm not sure what was wrong with it in the first place. All we did was replace the power supply and everything is fine.

Thanks to all who posted and hopefully this post will help others out with the same general issue.

 

[Jazket]

it is always prudent to disconnect everything and rebuild the computer from the beginning. try this:

disconnect any pheriperal, anything...everything!!!.

connect them back one by one. take all the time you may need.

this should be a Motherboard fault. Im pretty sure. It sucks. just try to use the less pheriperals you can.

Just leave on the CPU and the RAM, not even cdrom or hard disk, and take out any pci card and agp video card if installed.

with both the cpu and the ram installed, try to bring it on, if it doesnt, then we have a dead MB. since you installed another power supply and it didnt work, it may be, but u havent tried to plug it into another power jack in the wall. if you did, then try any pheriperal in another motherboard, if they work out aight....

the MB is dead. sorry for that. it was a bad surge, or grounded MB.