A while back I was using power tools in my house and the main trip on the fusebox tripped due to the surge - since then my desktop computer has behaving very badly. Immediately after the power trip, it showed one of the following symptoms: 1. The most frequent problem would usually show-up straight away on boot-up. It would show nothing on the monitor, but A recurrent harsh drive sound would come from the CPU unit (sounding like a CD or floppy access sound). This would continue indefinitely - only way to stop it would be to hold in the power button. 2. If I was lucky and this didn't happen, the computer would at first boot up OK, showing the startup wallpaper,and then continue. But very soon after it would crash and then restart, going again to the startup wallpaper, but this time it would freeze up. Again, I would have to hold in the power button to resolve this. I used the functions on my Windows recovery disk a few times to see if that would address this. I’ve tried the checkdisk, Fixboot and Fixmbr functions in succession, hoping it might have been a corrupted hard disk or similar. For a while I thought that this had fixed the problem - Windows would boot up OK and then work flawlessly. Until I shutdown, at which point it started playing up and doing the above again. For a while subsequent to this, I could get it to bootup after 5-10 goes of going through the above two symptoms until I got lucky and Windows started up. For a few days I persevered with this 'arrangement' as at least the computer would apparently work fine once Windows had loaded up. However, after those few days Windows started to unexpectedly crash. Now it is back to symptoms 1. and 2. again - mainly 2. I assume that something might have burnt out (despite being on a surge protected strip plug), but I would like to have an idea of what has been damaged before I take it in to be repaired, in case it is something simple or software-related that I can fix myself. The PC is a 'Maxdata Favorit 5000' about 4 years old and running XP with all Windows updates. Not 100% sure of any relevant technical details, but the Packing List states: - Intel CPU (P D 945 3.4GHz) - 1GB DDR2 533 memory - PSU Fortron 350W ATX/BTX - SATA HD drive Any ideas? Thx
At first glance, it seems to me that the Hard Disk is going under. Are you sure that the weird sound "sounding like a CD or floppy access sound" comes from the CPU Unit (I guess you mean the CPU, not the case overall)? Maybe it is coming from the HDD itself. That'd mean that you would need to buy a new HDD (or borrow one first, to see if that is really the problem) and do a fresh windows install (+ hookup the old HDD to copy needed data).
If you are worried about your motherboard being damaged... Have a look on the motherboard for any bulging or blown capaticors... These control the power distribution through out the board and if one of them is damaged by a power surge, it may be letting surplus power through parts of your board that cannot handle it. http://gallery.techarena.in/data/519/bad_cap.jpg The above link indicates what to look out for...
your having stability issues, generally down to unsafe overclock, not enough voltage on the vcore, vdram, gtlref, cpu-pll or nb and sb. But judging from what you've said it's getting worse and worse and i presume you havn't overclocked or messed with any voltages it must be the power supply unit. try running prime95 this will hammer your cpu and demand more power from the psu if it crashes within a few mins or computer turns off it will be power supply unit.
