Hi all,

I've got a problem with my PC and I was wondering if some people wouldn't mind taking some stabs at what they think it could be.

I brought a nice case for my PC the other day and transferred everything over along with adding some more RAM and a new HD. I got everything up and running but my new SATA hard drive was causing a few troubles. I was changing a few leads around and changing a few SATA related settings in my BIOS when I started to get power issues. A couple of times when I tried to restart the PC (to save BIOS changes), the PC would come to life and the fans would start to rotate. Then normally my monitor would kick in and some fans (motherboard or graphics card I believe) would jump down a notch. A few times this didn't happen and I had to unplug the power cord to the PC before I could get it to work properly again.

I got it back to work, changed some BIOS settings again and pressed restart. This time, the fans would start to run then all power would cut out. It would then start itself again 5 seconds later. Then it would get into a loop of powering up then shutting down till I pulled the plug.

I removed every lead and started to plug them in one by one. When just the motherboard was getting power, it was fine. As soon as I plugged in the square (2x2), 12v lead that feeds power to the processor via the motherboard, the problem started again.

Does anyone believe I could have fried the motherboard or the processor? I'm going to get a new power supply tomorrow to test the problem but obviously if somebody could give me a better idea of what it is I'd appreciated it.

Cheers,
Lee

Sounds like a tricky one this, but one thing to try is to reset the CMOS memory - there should be something in the Motherboard manual to describe this. This will reset the motherboard to the default state, hopefully if any settings in the bios were wrong they will be sorted. Try to boot with the absolute minimum plugged in - ram, cpu & graphics. Pull everything else out and see what happens. If this doesn't give you anything you may have a problem with your mobo or cpu!

Tried a new PSU - didn't help.
Reset the BIOS using the jumper I have on my mobo, no good :(

I tried unplugging everything and starting again. For a while I had a different problem - but essentially the PC didn't start. Then after a while the same problem came back. I'm thinking the motherboard got fried. Time to take it to the repair shop I think. Let somebody with some experience deal with this.