Help, PC fried

[steve101]

Hi

I had a PC sent over from the states for work purposes. for the last few days, its been making funny noises from one of the fans - I cleaned it out, and it started working again normally.

had to leave PC on last night - when i got up, no noise from the pc room. weird....so i go to look, and theres a horrible sort of plasticy / metallic burnt smell, with (i think) "code 83) showing on the motherboard.

(think it is a ABIT motherboard, and after googling code 83, seems to be to do with power supply).

on / off switch didn't work, and in a half asleep haze i accidentally flipped the switch on the side (it sticks out in a really stupid way) that changes the voltage.

blue light, FZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. totally dead.

its obvious that at least the power supply is completely dead, i'm just curious as to whether

1) you think any of the other bits have been damaged, either from the initial overnight blowout or from the switch flip of doom, and

2) if you think the two hard drives inside the pc will be okay. of course, i have backups - but i hate to waste hard drives, you know?

[liambl]

In my experience, flipping the voltage selector hasn't damaged anything but the psu. As for the overnight blow, the only way tp find out if the pc is ok will be to try another psu.
And depending where the psu blew, the hdds could be damaged. Once again you will need to try another psu.

[freakitchen]

The safety of your components depends quite a bit on the quality of that power supply - better ones have over-voltage protection, that in theory, prevents other components from being fried.

Replace that power supply with a quality unit (if you advise us of system specs, we can recommend something), and assemble the system as detailed in this thread to perform an out-of-case boot. If it fires up correctly, you know your core components are OK.

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=132409

[steve101]

Thanks. Just been to the pc shop, here are the findings so far:

damage report - power unit, wrecked.

memory sticks - possible problems there, but they were screwy from the outset.

stuck a new power unit on it, motherboard kicks in and everything seems to be fine.

except....

....the pc has two sata drives in it - we get a disk read error no matter how you plug them in, the board just won't recognise them.

yet if he sticks the main hard drive of mine in his own pc, it boots ( but slowly).

finally, if he sticks his own test HD into my slightly frazzled computer, it loads up.

if the hds were completely destroyed, surely they wouldn't work in his PC either - is it possible some component of the motherboard that recognises the sata drives has fried too?

[steve101]

the guy in the shop reckons my two SATA drives are fine, and he can access them on his PC using a Serial ATA PCI host adapter.

my home pc doesn't support IDE cables, so he sold me one and said its plug and play - great, but no luck so far.

it says to "install drivers"if youre on windows - but it comes with a ton of folders, each with all sorts of programs and drivers inside, and no indication whatsoever what ones you're supposed to install.

trying to run this thing on a windows XP machine if it helps. earlier on it said new raid device ready to use, but even though i've plugged in the external hard drive to the device using a red SATA / ide cable, i'm not seeing anything being picked up and theres no hard drive showing in "my computer"(which is where i'd expect it to be).

any thoughts?