...and all of a sudden it went BOOM!

[Bigjakkstaffa]

About five minutes ago, i was sitting, happily playing NHL2004, beating virtual sportsmen around the head with virtual sticks, as happy as a pig in the proverbial brown stuff.

All of a sudden there was a loud "BANG" from inside the machine and eveything went dead. Not good. I powered down and powered back up, nothing, no post or anything. Panicking, i unplugged at the wall and plugged back in. Hurrah, it posted - and then hung. Initially the motherboard diagnostic was giving a C1 error message, related to RAM malfuction. However on subsequent efforts i am now recieving a "6d" reading, which seems to be related to ISA PnP devices (interesting given there aint no ISA slots) and COM ports.

The machine starts posting alright, recognising the CPU type and speed, and then acknowledges the existence of memory running at 166Mhz in Dual Channel Mode, at this point it hangs before proceeding to the memory test and onwards. This to me would suggest hosed RAM, i havent got any other DDR-RAM in the house so cant test it for sure, however testing the two DIMM's seperatley across all sockets doesnt result in POST completion, which makes me skeptical the RAM has blown, as ive never seen 2 DIMM's go at the same time (but hey i coul be wrong), similarly if the memory was borked, woudl it even be abel to POST at all?

The video card seems okay (afterall it's got beefed up cooling and isnt particularly stressed), while he only majorly stressed component - the CPU (which is heavily o/c'ed) seems okay as its detecting that fine. I've cleared CMOS to no avail, the POST just stops and i cant proceed any furthur, no error message is given onscreen and the machine is unresponsive to keyboard input.

Any thoughts guys and gal's? Borked memory (hopefully, life-time warranty) or something more serious (hope not - i'm poor)?

I'm off to have another poke around, thoughts and input greatly appreciated


===SPEC===

Epox 8rda+
2x256mb Crucial PC2700
ATI R9800Pro w/AS Cooler v3
Athlon XP2400+
Hiper 420W PSU

(all other devices are disconnected for time being)

--Jakk

[BipolarBill]

Look for an exploded capacitor on the video card, motherboard and inside the PSU.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

I'm getting a sneaking suspicion one of my CD-ROM drives may have blow its porch light.

At present its booting fully fine with the two HDD's (thank god, if id have lost those...) and a single stick of RAM in, i'm going to pop the second stick in and see how she goes, then hook up the CD-ROM drives (ive got a feeling my LG Burner - which has been a little nigglesome lately may be misbehaving)

Back in a moment

--Jakk

[Bigjakkstaffa]

All of a sudden, its fine. For why i dont know, at first it seemed that hooking up the CD-ROM devices was causing it, but it appears to have stopped now and theyre both working fine.

I'm gonna thrash it about a bit, see if i cant break it again and find out what really happened

--Jakk

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Out of interest, it has been stormy earlier in the day, with quite heavy thunder storms. However they stopped about an hour before this incident. However, is it possible that "dirty" electricity or a delayed spike of soem sort could have been sent up the line, causing the machine to go "boom" as it did and a bit temporarily dizzy?

--Jakk

[BipolarBill]

If I were you, that would be my hope.

[Strawbs]

whilst your thrashing don't forget to backup - just in case!

[Bigjakkstaffa]

I dont get it... i just dont get it. After an hour of assorted gaming back at fully overclocked speeds, it appears to be (*tempts fate with a big bag of sweets*) absoloutley fine

Crazyness...

--Jakk

[Johnny Fist]

I'd still back up everything ASAP. After that, I'd buy a surge protector. You really need to pinpoint what happened with that loud popping noise. Whatever it is could either return or eventually trash other parts of your system previously unaffected.

[crossedup]

Did you eject the drives yet?

You didnt have a cd in a drive that may have exploded do you? Dont know if that would have shut the computer down but when a CD exploded, shatters i guess, it does make a very similar sound. One time it happened to me I wasnt sure what it was until I ejected the "used to be" cd

[fishybawb]

My initial guess would be the same as Bill's - capacitor, but if it's OK now I guess that's not the problem... Whatever it was, it can't be a good sign.

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Disks are fine and i have got a surge protector on the power line which seems fine (if it gets called into use it makes the socket extension unusable afterwards IIRC).

I'll be keeping quite a close eye on this over the next few days, see if it tries a repeat performance

--Jakk

[Prushka]

Originally posted by crossedup
Did you eject the drives yet?

You didnt have a cd in a drive that may have exploded do you? Dont know if that would have shut the computer down but when a CD exploded, shatters i guess, it does make a very similar sound. One time it happened to me I wasnt sure what it was until I ejected the "used to be" cd

Just curious...a CD can actually explode? Do they over heat or what?

[ukulele]

Here's something to think about. I was in my shop one day and heard a loud bang/pop behind me. I turned around and looked everywhere but couldn't find any thing that could have caused it. So I shrugged it off. Next day, same time in the morning, I heard it again. This went on for a week or so untill I finally realised what it was. I had an empty can of lacquer thinner sitting in the morning sun near a window. When the air expanded in the can it would bang real loud when it reached a certain temperature. I moved the can and that solved that mystery.