Water spillage - please help
- Thread starter amy kemp
- Start date
Yes, all definitely unplugged. My husband knows how to fix most things but inside a computer is a different story but he'll try.
As well as removing the power switch connector from the motherboard, it may also be advisable to remove the front USB header plug from the motherboard too.
What motherboard is it?
Thank you so muchIf you post details of the motherboard you have inside the PC, we can talk you through how you can try to turn it back on. Or a picture of the insides or both.
OK do this...
See the red pins I coloured in this pic? Take out the two wires going into them very carefully, then plug everything back in like it was. Then carefully, very carefully, place a flat headed screwdriver or some such metal object so that it bridges the two pins, i.e. makes contact with both at the same time. The PC might boot up. Be prepared for it to kick into life as soon as you touch the two pins.
See the red pins I coloured in this pic? Take out the two wires going into them very carefully, then plug everything back in like it was. Then carefully, very carefully, place a flat headed screwdriver or some such metal object so that it bridges the two pins, i.e. makes contact with both at the same time. The PC might boot up. Be prepared for it to kick into life as soon as you touch the two pins.
Cross your fingers?
Some peoplee recommend removing the other power connectors from the PSU (HDDs, CPU, etc). I never have but up to you.
You can still do that if you like. All you need to do there is turn the PC on at the mains and press the rocker switch on the back of it to see if the fan spins up. It probably will.
I've just powered it up with the shortout wire on pin 3 and 4 and the PSU fan fires up as well as the usb fans. Everything else is disconnected from the board.
(If I run out of 'allowed' comments I'll come back to my last comment and keep editing it)
Fingers were well and truly crossed
Fans all fired up. Everything else was disconnected.
(If I run out of 'allowed' comments I'll come back to my last comment and keep editing it)
Yeah so it so far is sounding like it may well just be that small little circuit board which does the power/reset/activity led/usb ports which might be fried. If you do as I said above shorting out the pins, it may well fully power up. It's basically powering it up by not using the power button which could be dead.
Before doing what you said above, I don't know whether I should plug the hard drives and all the other connectors that come from the PSU back onto the board and do the short test again? Could it still be an internal fault in the PSU?
The paper clip test is just literally to test the power supply unit works. You've proved it does.
Next thing is plug everything back how it was and short those pins I said and I reckon it will boot up. If it doesn't, post back, there are other things you can try.
Can I just ask.
If it's possibly the switch panel/led/usb panel at the front of the tower, do I need to disconnect this before powering up just incase the short is still there?
Yeah where the wires all go into that place above in the image I posted, you can actually pull ALL of those wires out of the main board. So if you want to be safe you can pull out the ones doing the activity LED, reset switch, usb ports etc. Reason I said not to, is it can be a fiddle to get them perfect on the right pins so was trying to keep it simple to start with.
If the short it still there, it is unlikely to do damage, but more likely to simply affect operation of the LED, USB ports and/or reset/power switch. Up to you.
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Thank you. If it does kick into life, what do I do then? Is it ok to take the screwdriver straight off?
EDIT I've run out of posts so I am going to have to edit this post everytime I reply.
EDIT I've done the touch test with screwdriver and nothing happened. What step is next please? Thank you so much for your help so far
EDIT everything removed other than one stick of ram and CPU. Still nothing
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Yes take it immediately off. It will instantly boot up on first touch, or not. If not, it's not worked. Just make sure you have touched both pins.
EDIT: The PC needs to be on at the mains with the PSU rocker switch set to ON, and all leads plugged back in (apart from the front panel ones we talked about).
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Next would be to start trying to boot it up with bare minimum components to see what is broken. Starts to get a bit more involved now... so try booting with just the CPU and one stick of ram installed. You may have to take everything out of the case to eliminate a short to the actual case/board.
