So I need a multimeter. Should have one of those. Surprisingly enough, this DOESN'T get the shocked out of you, having the PSU connected and everything? Nothing gets fried or anything like that?
No, you don't. Just look at the pictures and read the instructions for removing the power plug and shorting the pins.
Doesn't explain it or show it very well - looks like they somehow got the plastic coverings to come off, which they don't explain how to do. But they make it sound like you can put a paperclip in there to do it with - is that the case? If not, how to get the plastic off?
There's no pictures of the plastic coming off. They show the plug being unplugged. They show some needles put in to test the plug with the multimeter, but that's not what we're worried about now. Then they show a screwdriver shorting the two pins on the motherboard.
Right, so how to get the plastic bit off to short it then, if a paperclip can't be inserted to short it? Sitting here with a paperclip and screwdriver, no joke.
There's no plastic to take off. You unplug the switch from the motherboard, which will leave two metal pins. You said you already removed them .. ?
Okay, so, PC turns on, however won't boot from HDD... It's read as a boot device, I see it in the boot options, but it doesn't go to windows after that - instead some error about improper boot device or something along those lines. Unless GIGABYTE mobos are known for this kind of thing and need to be set up a certain way, or anything like that, I'm starting to think a power surge hit my PC and fried some things - especially since a lot of fans got damaged and I had to replace 3 of them, will need to replace my GPU soon because of it, the HDD is doing this, the DVD drive won't open at all, etc. So, do I need a new HDD, OS, and DVD drive now, or is there a way I can recover from this at all with a laptop? @Saiboogu @Sandbag Any help would be appreciated.
Sorry, missed the pin test result. All that eliminated were the switches, but it was worth checking because of the symptoms. Current symptoms.. Sounds like a bad drive, but after all the recent problems it does sound like something bigger. Elaborate on that string of failures some?
Well, after getting new mobo and PSU in and PC still not turning on (turns out in my excitement to be gaming again, I forgot to plug in the power stuff - oops) I took it to local computer place out of frustration. Turns out, fans weren't working properly - 1 GPU fan and basically all case fans. So I replaced the case fans, going to need a new GPU I suppose before it overheats itself to death. It seemed like everything worked properly, even the new fans were loud and working great - but we didn't plug the PC into a monitor or anything. So I got home and hooked it up, turns out HDD isn't booting properly, and that's basically all this. I'm ASSUMING it tried rebooting when I started it up and power surged through and damaged stuff, no idea though. Oh, forgot to mention - the DVD drive not opening. I was trying to see if I could get it to boot off the DVD given to me with the mobo, in hopes that might do something, I can not get the drive to open at all, but I do hear it making some kind of noises, like it's trying to open - odd thing is there is literally nothing for it to catch itself on so I'm clueless.
Normal operation, it's nearly impossible to get the wrong power in the wrong place ace damage things. A PSU that failed in a bad way or lightning strike nearby could toast that much stuff. You can most likely replace the gpu fan, if it works otherwise. Hdd could be bad or just data corruption. You'll want a way to test it. Let me Google for some live cds. You have a working cd burner or spare thumb drive available?
I can look for a CD burner/PC that can make use of it, as for thumb drive it will depend how big it needs to be, but I'm pretty sure we will have one that can handle it. I've already contemplated throwing Ubuntu on one of our thumb drives and running my PC off of it just to have my PC again, even if I wouldn't be gaming.
I was trying to tag him, but I think you can see now the reason I didn't. Unless his name on here is still @Takimaru ?
Here's probably the easiest all-purpose livecd for testing. This page has the info for downloading and burning to CD, and towards the bottom is a link for USB instructions. http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html You'll probably want to check MHDD32 under the HDD/Diagnostics section of the livecd. There are also some repair & recovery tools if the hardware is good and you want to try and repair the OS install, but we can look at that later.
Sweet, thanks for that Saib. Now to wait for my mom to get back from the ER and see if I can steal her thumb drive... think a 16GB thumb drive is enough?
