Troubleshooting a broken system

[steve_e]

Hi -
I have a PC I built last year. Yesterday the PSU blew (came in and the system was powered down and there was a strong smell of burning).

The system is built in an Antec P180 case and has a good Antec 500W PSU so that was a little sad. I can send the PSU back under warranty, but I can't wait for the thing to arrive, so I went out and bought another (600W Arctic Jeantech). All seems well in terms of power - fans, CD Drives etc all light up and move.

But the system won't boot up. How can I work out which bit might be damaged? The PSU was attached to a Belkin surgemaster so it ought not to have been a mains power spike should it?

I've removed the CMOS battery to clear CMOS. But there are no beeps to indicate that anything is starting, no keyboard response and no signal to the monitor.

Is there any way to determine whether the processor or motherboard are damaged (apart from buying new ones and testing them one by one}?

How do people normally work their way through a problem like this? I'd be grateful for any suggestions!

 

[w3bbo]

It could be one thing, it could be everything thats causing the problem. The first port of call for me would be the motherboard.

When you are testing it all out just test the bare essentials first and work up from there.

Motherboard, memory, cpu and VGA - if it boots into bios then you're ok to start adding other bits and pieces such as hd's and ide drives.

 

[steve_e]

Thanks for that! Looks like the problem lies somehow with either a couple of fan cables or with the CD drives/cables. I pulled everything out and it booted into BIOS. Plugged in the hard drives and it booted into XP perfectly happily!!

All the rest is just detail. I'm going to go and dance round the garden first!