power cut = dead computer

the_r_sole

the_r_sole

the_r_sole

Soldato
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25 Aug 2010
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Hi there, I left my pc on last night stupidly, and there was a powercut in the middle of the night, unfortunately I didn't wake up when the ups was beeping so the power to the machine was cut.
this morning I went to fire the machine up and it looked like everything was going ok apart from there was no signal to the monitors... I have taken the machine to bits and hit it with compressed air etc, however I have just removed the HDD (samsung spinpoint f3 500gb) and plugged it into my laptop with a sata/usb cable I have, I'm not sure if there is enough power getting to the drive using this, or is there and the drive is buggered? any suggestions on how to test it knowing I have enough power?
 
no signal to the monitors? not even bios screen? if the hdd was dead youd still reach the bios

id leave out the motherboard battery to fully clear the cmos for 30 minutes and then try

it will reset your bios/oc to default settings
 
willing to try anything here!
no signal at all - I have dual monitor setup, so I tried it with both and then with just one to see, but at no time did either have a signal - will try the battery
cheers
 
Situations like this make me want to splash out on a UPS.

However, try taking out the CMOS Battery as above, but also do you have another computer you can try components on? Maybe another motherboard you can put your CPU into? As with the error's you're getting I'd put my money on CPU or Motherboard however thankfully I don't know much about this however, I guess its worth a try?
 
Did it seem like it was booting up but not outputting to the monitors?

I had something similar last year and it turned out my primary GFX card had died ( funnily enough after a power cut ). I was fortunate enough to have SLI at the time so had the other card to fall back on.

What PSU are you using as its possible that's been damaged also
 
yeah, exactly that, it seemed to be booting fine but nowt on the monitors - the gfx card is a palit geforce (can't remember exactly!)
I thought about the psu, but it seems to be ok, all the fans etc were powering up, it's a corsair one so hopefully that's ok!
I'll get everything re-assembled shortly and give it another bash, this self employed thing is a killer sometimes!


hyburnate - the ups is only good if you don't sleep through the beeping like a diddy!
the only other system I have sitting about is a tiny shuttle xpc, so not good for testing anything on!
 
Nice save. I've been there and had it be my PSU which wasn't sending the PWR_OK signal to boot but was powering all the fans leds etc, so if it happens again check that out.
 
This is one of the reasons I like using ocing mobos like the Rampage IV Extreme, they are used to rough treatment and err lots of power cuts.
 
I had a power cut during a bit of a storm at my old house and it killed everything in my PC except the graphics card, i tested the mem cpu hdd all in another system all kaput. Dunno why the graphics card survived.
 
the_r_sole said:
hyburnate - the ups is only good if you don't sleep through the beeping like a diddy!
the only other system I have sitting about is a tiny shuttle xpc, so not good for testing anything on!
Click to expand...

A good UPS will have software (powerchute, etc.) and a USB interface or similiar so it can be configured to shutdown a PC.
 
Rroff said:
A good UPS will have software (powerchute, etc.) and a USB interface or similiar so it can be configured to shutdown a PC.
Click to expand...

+1

My machines shutdown gracefully at 20% battery capacity remaining. APC powerchute is ok but I have had problems running it on a server box....I just use windows similar to a laptop. :D
 
i wonder if i was lucky because we had a power a few months back but fortunately it didnt fry any of my components :eek:
 
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