Ok, what did I kill, yes I am an idiot

[Squisher]

My name is Squisher and I am an idiot. I noticed that I had forgotten to plug in my cpu fan to the power supply after I booted up so being the highly intelligent fellow that I am I decided to plug in the molex connector "hot". As I got the two connectors close to one another there was an arc, then nothing, no power, nothing. Anybody's best guess as to which order I should start exchanging components first? mobo, cpu, ps, vid card?

 

[minendo]

PSU. Have you tried unplugging the power cable from the PSU for a few minutes and then plugging it back in and trying to power on the computer. I made a similar dumb@ss move one day and used the steps above and it worked fine. All I did was shorted out my PSU and it needed to be reset. The steps above were how to reset my PSU.

 

[uglyjack]

that sounds pretty terrible... i would firstly check power supply, although the way you put it, it's dead... Then mother board. Then if the molex'es you were using branched off check those devices.
I would personally check each piece individually by testing in different system, before you start ordering.

Mind you, i dont have much experience with power surges or arcs,or what have you with power. im just throwing my opinion into the mix.

 

[Lonewolf54]

I too would start with the power supply.

Something similar happened to me about 5 years ago when I pulled the power cable, with the system hot, to determine whether a particular hard drive was spinning. The power arced and then everything in the puter went dark and quiet. I did not know that a power supply could be reset so I just replaced it and everything else was fine.

Hopefully in your case it won't be anything more serious than a PS.

 

[boran]

heh I nearly had the same, I used my own soldered fan molex for a fan with rather too high current or resistance I suppose cous instead of turning the fan sparks flew over from one part of teh soldering to the other, I quickly turned off teh power, let it cool down for an hour (was REALLY hot) and then I booted back on, only one dead fan and fried molex adaptor ...

 

[Squisher]

Power Supply was the problem. It had to reset itself. It was kinda weird the way it took some time for it to reset. Just had to sit there for a few minutes and wait, then finally it turned back on. Thanks all.