Need help w/ diagnosis

[killerdc]

Im not sure where to begin.

I had a p4 2.4 with ic7-max 3 mobo, had two ata drives hooked up with 512k or pc3200 geil ram. I also ran an ati 9700 pro all in wonder. I decided it was time to upgrade and bought an ati x800 pro, one gig of geil ultra series ram 1 gb, and 2 sata drives.

Well to make a long story short, all this was going into another case but it turned out that cases power switch didnt work (i was mad) after two hours of moving stuff, i had to move it all back. When i fired it all back up, there was smoke, and apparently the power at the floppy had arced a wire and it melted the covering instantly. It was just an extension to the power supply so i thought maybe i was ok. I replaced the floppy and proceeded. All appeared well in the beginning. I set up the system to run in raid and for the first night all went well. Then things went wrong. I play counterstrike, and it was freezing in game, but allowing me access to the in game menus. It would reboot my computer as soon as i exited the game. It finally came to where it wouldnt let me boot into windows saying system32/drivers/pci.sys was missing or corrupt.

Well I then thought that maybe the video card or new ram was bad so I began testing with the old setup. I first put back in the old ram. Same problem. I then put back the old video card, same problem. I rehooked my old ata drive up and things actually worked which made me think it was one of the new hd's. Well that worked for a day and a half then it stopped working. (Nothing new was ever added to the old hd). Then i began thinking possible ps, so i went and bought a new ps, and still the same problem.

My question is after this entire segment,,,,, do you think I have a bad mobo, a bad chip,,, something else is wrong? I am at my wit's end here as I have no idea where to go. I have built many computers and never had a problem this bad and I dont know what to do next.

[Kov-Ice]

Welcome to PCMech. Sorry you're having such problems. You may want to go back to the beginning and follow the instructions HAL gives in his troubleshooting thread located HERE . Maybe by stripping down to bare parts, you can swap pieces out one at a time to locate the culprit.

[killerdc]

Will the fact that I had that little incident with the wire affect anything. If the mobo or chip got shocked when the power was turned on how would that affect it?

Also, I read that post by HAL and my only question is,,, assuming I take the barebones out and connect only those components, how do i tell what the problem is if it doesnt work? I guess I need to know how to diagnosis whether a chip or mobo is bad.