Electrical Surge – Computer won’t power up
After an electrical surge my computer is dead, nothing powers up. A friend thought it mught be a fuse. Is there such a thing and where would it be in the computer?
There usually is a fuse in the power supply of the computer, but because of the capacitors and such inside of the power supply I would advise against opening it up.
Just get a new P/S, hook it up to the computer and see if the machine will work then. I generally will just unplug everything from the old P/S and then plug in the new one before actually putting it in the case just to make sure it works. If it does, then I unscrew the old supply from the case, install the new one in it’s place and then you’re good to go.
More often than not it’s just the power supply that’s dead. They’re built to die before anything else in a surge, which is nice, cause I’d rather replace a $50 power supply than a $150 motherboard and a $200 processor.
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Following thunderstorms in the area the computer won’t boot up. Booting from the system disk there is a message “Can’t find a hard drive.” What do I do now?
After a lightning storm I can’t boot the eMachine. Using the system disc to see what happend. I did get a message “Can’t find hard drive”. Where do I go from here?
You have a couple of options. You’ll either want to remove the hard drive from your computer and hook it up to another machine to see if the other machine recognizes it, or you’re going to want to plug a different hard drive into your machine and see if your machine recognizes the new drive.
More than likely the thunderstorm fried your hard disk as storage devices don’t take too kindly to electrical surges or brownouts. Hard drives are especially hard hit as they have both electronic components, and motors.
I highly recommend having your machine hooked up to an uninterruptable power supply (also known simply as a UPS, APC is an excellent brand; currently the one I use), preferably an intelligent one that will actively regulate the power being fed to the computer. This tends to greatly increase the lifespan of the computers that I’ve dealt with.