help! power supply cable burned - now what?

[nikko]

I had a new build working fine for about 24 hours. Last night I decided to add a front panel Firewire connector to it. It needs a floppy drive power cable to connect. Anyway, I apparently misaligned the connector by 1 pin when I installed it. Within literally 2 seconds of me turning on the computer, there was the smell of burnt plastic and smoke was pouring out of the case. I turned it off as quickly as I could and popped it open. The power cable connected to the front panel was burned through and the copper wire was exposed and broken.

Anyway, I guess my main concern is what damage this might have done to the rest of my computer. I don't see any signs of physical damage anywhere other than the PSU cable. I tried restarting the computer and it seems to boot but will always abruptly shut down just as it's loading the desktop, sometimes sooner.

So I guess my question is, how likely is it that getting a new power supply will fix my problem?

 

[Modelworks]

Sounds like you grounded the +5V . Surprised it didn't cause the supply to shutdown, but I suppose if the wires are small enough that it could melt them before it did. Couple things I would do. Get a meter and measure the voltages to see if they are in spec. Make a boot disc with memtest and let that run to see if its a memory/motherboard issue.
http://www.memtest.org/

 

[HOOfan 1]

His PSU might not have had over current protection.

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

I did more or less the same (via a misaligned floppy connector to a 3.5 floppy) with an Antec Truepower 350 like 5 years ago. within seconds smoke was everywhere. cable was burned and melted. amazing how fast five 80mm fans can fill a room with smoke

anyway I just cut the melted cable off and the computer was fine, no damage at all aside from the floppy was dead from the melted power connector. The Antec PSU is still powering a backup computer to this day.

try the memtest bit, and try just booting to the BIOS screen and seeing what shows up under Hardware Monitoring as far as voltages etc. also see how long it runs.



what brand of PSU was it?