No boot after power outage - what now?

Wife computer. Power surge followed by outage. Both the other computers in the room restarted fine. Hers..not so much. Checked cables etc but no power up from the system at all. Then when I disconnected the external USB hub, the computer sprang to life and booted all the way through to windows.

So far so good. Now, one case fan was making a noise like a bad bearing, so I exited windows through the normal shutdown procedure. Disconnected the bad fan and on restart ... crickets!

I have;

• disconnected all the peripherals except monitor, USB keyboard
• cleared CMOS
• removed and reset CMOS battery just to be sure
• vacuumed out the dust bunnies
• re-checked cables

The system refuses to power at all. No lights, no fans, not even a click.


Since the computer successfully booted once, I think I can rule out most possible dire consequences of a power surge like faults to power supply, HDD, mobo, magic smoke etc.



Ideas please!

hi I would not rule out the power supply. if you can I would take power supply from another computer and try it again.

the power surge appears to have affected things given that you had to disconnect the usb hub, and also that a fan became noisy, meaning its acting overvolted. My guess is your power supply is fried. When a power supply goes bad sometimes it just dies, but other times it produces wildly varying voltages. That's what I thought of when you mentioned your fan. If you are up for the effort, swap in a different power supply and see if it boots up. If not, the motherboard is probably toast.

Good call. It was in fact the power supply. Sadly, the new Antec 500W Earthwatts.

Anyway, I popped an old junker in there and it booted right up. I'll just be thankful it didn't take out the mobo I guess!

yeah it could of been worse