~misfit~ wrote:
> God I'm sick of helping 'friends' with their PCs. I'm posting this
here as I
> had SETI installed on it <G> and I'm having trouble resolving it so
thought
> I would draw on the wealth of knowledge here.
>
> I need help with this latest one.
>
For all it is worth, I had a similiar problem a few months ago. A
computer had multiple problems when the PS went and damaged almost
everything else on the MB.
After I was done, I had replaced the MB, Processor, PS, video card and
HD and CD rom and an interface card. Basically the only thing left
was the case. As this system was a rackmount for work, it needed to work.
I knew that the PS was shot as it was smoked with smoke traces on the
case.
Basically it turned out that I had to put the suspect parts in a known
good computer to test which ones worked. As I was fixing this
computer for someone else, I had to confirm each part that failed
before I could get replacements. They first gave me a Dell PS to
replace the burnt out one with but the Dell has a different pin layout
than a regular PS so it may have caused some problems when they first
tried it.
Basic rule of thumb I use when going in circles is to work with
individual parts and confirm their operations. I would confirm all
voltages on the MB.
The system would startup an beep but would not do anything else with a
known good PS and then shutdown. This was the symptom each time that
I put in one of the bad components. They were all taking one PS line
down as far as I could test thus shutting the PS down. This is why I
started moving parts into a known good system to test.