HELP - PC Dead in Water

[thomman]

My 2yr old Athlon K7 700 Mhz on a PCChips 800LMR mobo died after a power supply incident. I'm a rookie to HW stuff, so could you guys pls. help me find the fault with my system. 250 Watt Power Supply sparked and died a day after installing a new Maxtor 80G drive. Replaced with a new Antec 300 W power supply. No use. Removed connections of all components one by one. Found that if I remove power to my old WD20G the CPU fans start up, but no beeps or video (CPU fans start just by plugging on mains I need not even push the power button on case??). Also the new HD, FDD and the CD all start simultaneously. Removed memory sticks and replaced with fresh ones. Could you guys guide me how to proceed.

Thanks in advance

 

[WarCon]

Pull all the drives and all unnecessary parts (leaving only the mobo, processor, memory and video card).

If it won't power-up with just these components then with its last gasp, the dying powersupply cooked an essential component. These components you will have to swap test (if you can). Preferably swap to a different computer the memory, processor and video card (there is a slight chance if your mobo is really damaged in a weird way you can damage another component - which if you are borrowing a friends processor and you cook it he may not be very happy with you.).

Good luck

 

[Slacker]

and for gods sake, get it out of the water!
(sorry)

 

[spanky]

i had a similar thing happen to me. i do not really know how to explain it but, basically... i think the psu shorted out the wd hd. and every other wd hd it touched, it killed (the wd no longer worked in other systems either). then when i put a maxtor in the system, it worked fine. so i rma'ed the wd's and when they came back, the psu zapped them again. so i rma'ed them again, and replaced the psu. strange.... i can't really explain what happened, but that's my resolution. rma'ed the hd's... replace the psu.