PSU died, unable to boot windows after replacing it

Ian13

Ian13

Ian13

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15 Jul 2016
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24
Halp!!!

So, last Sunday was a scorcher here in Barcelona, middle of a gaming session my PC died hard (instantly) & I smelt burning.

It wouldn't restart.

I took out the PSU, got it checked & it´s dead (looking inside it through the slats of the fan I can see some little white gloop).

That was a Corsair AX760 platinum, not a cheap PSU, & not overloaded at all, I run (or ran) a single GPU, a 980TI.

I bought myself a Corsair 850X in the RM series (in case I ever go to 2 x GPU), put that in, thought it would work - nope.

I got fans moving, lights on motherboard, no movement from the GPU, no HD noises, no beeps either.

I took it to my local PC shop, & they say the MB is ok, the new PSU is ok, the RAM is ok, the CPU is ok, but the GPU is dead & the machine won´t boot from the SSD anymore. Weirdly, I'd also taken them my previous GPU to put in in case the 980TI was dead, & they said that GPU (working fine in that system 15 months ago when I replaced it with the 980TI) was also dead (!?)

So I was resigned to using the intel onboard graphics until I can get the GPU replaced (if it really is borked).

The PC shop said I needed to reformat the SSD, reinstall Windows. They were able to get the system running off a HD of their own, not sure how that was connected.

Anyway, I now find further problems - it won´t boot from either the SSD or the CD/ROM drive, & not being able to boot from my CD drive I'm rather stuck.

All i get is the Asus UEFI bios, showing the CD drive & the SSD in the Boot order. I can select either one of them as the first Boot drive, save & exit, but then the dratted thing does not go ahead & boot windows, just remorselessly does back to the UEFI Bios.

Any ideas?

I've googled a lot today on the works PC, have nabbed some ideas about settings in the UEFI BIOS I'll mess with tonight. Unless I'm missing something highly dumb, I suspect the BIOS is corrupt.

Has anyone had anything similar?

Is resetting the CMOS likely to help, or perhaps downloading the BIOS onto a usb stick & using the flash function on the UEFI BIOS to update the BIOS?

I can´t say I know the consequences of doing either of those options, think I might do better to call someone out to look at it.

Humping a fully loaded HAF X up 4 flights of stairs isn´t something I want t repeat any time soon (argh, my back).

Everything is in warranty, I've already contacted Corsair.
 
If your previous GPU didn't work either, it sounds like the PSU failure may have damaged your motherboard or other components.

This can happen when PSUs fail. As good as the protection circuitry is, sometimes other hardware gets damaged.

Clearing the BIOS will reset the defaults. If the settings have got screwed up, this might help. If the BIOS is corrupted, I'm surprised it actually boots at all. Flashing the BIOS is straightforward depending on the board, what Asus board is it?
 
Hi - it's an Asus Z97 Pro, thanks.

I've managed to actually get into Windows now - fortunately I found my old HD hanging about which had windows on it from before I changed to the SSD, I put that in, & to my shock the machine booted.

The SSD & the M2 drive both show in device manager, but don't show under Devices & Drives as local discs or volumes. I think that means they need to be reformatted 7 presumably everything on them is gone.

The hard drives on my system do show as volumes I can access.

I think I need to double check the GPU really is dead, & then see about recovering the data on the M2 & SSD ... iirc I just had windows on the SSD & games (downloaded free or from Steam) on the M2. If recovering it is too much hassle/expense or impossible, I'll reformat them both, if they're actually alive at least.
 
And in fact the PC is booting from the SSD itself not any of the HDs (!)

I think I may well have derped when connecting the SATA cables, missed by the PC shop.

The GPU still isn´t working, well, the fans run, & the PC gets a Windows display using the CPUs onboard graphics even when the HDMI cable is connected to the GPU´s port, but the 980TI isn´t recognised.
 
It's more or less sorted - the AMD290 card does work in the top MB PCI slot (despite the pc shop saying it was broke too), so the slot is ok. The 980TI doesn't work, it's less than a year old, so I expect to get it replaced.

So, the PSU dying did succeed in taking out the single most expensive component in my system, & left the rest untouched.
 
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