computer won't power on... help?

[Mizugori]

Okay, so a PC (that I built about a year and a half ago) would not turn on the other day. I smelled something vaguely similar to a kind of burning smell so I immediately shut off the surge protector it was plugged into. Sure enough, the smell was coming from the power supply.

I bought a new corsair power supply, replaced the old one, and put it all back together. When I first plugged it in, I thought hmmm that's weird, doesn't the fan in the power supply usually spin for a sec or two when you first flip it on? Tried to turn on the PC, and the fan on the cpu and the fan at the back of the case start to spin for like 1/4 second and the power button on the front of the pc lights up for that same 1/4 second but then that's it. I tried a different surge protector, etc, plugged a lamp into the same exact port on the same surge protector so I know it's working, same results.

If I try to push the power button again, nothing happens at all - but if I flip the switch on the power supply off and then on again, and then press power on the PC, I get another brief instant of power button light and the fan on the cpu and the rear care fan spin for a 1/4 turn, that's about it.

Did I just get extremely unlucky and happen to buy a dead power supply? Or did the old power supply's death throes fry something else in the computer?

 

[SolidBladez]

Sounds like your old PSU killed something. Any chance you have a backup rig that you could test the new PSU on?

 

[Mizugori]

anybody else want to weigh in lol...?

does power supply death usually cause other things to get damaged? this is new territory for me because this is the first time I have ever actually had a PSU die.

 

[Phog]

You're in for some testing. Start swapping parts around until you narrow it down. As SolidBladez said, it sounds like the problem goes beyond the PSU. It could be memory, motherboard, or vid card. Probably not CPU.

 

[Reader]

It's possible that the old PSU damaged something, though it's not very likely. The PSU usually dies itself before it damages PC components, if it's a quality PSU. But, like the others said, you should acquire another rig to test the new PSU on.

I bought a faulty power supply once for testing purposes and it did the same thing. When I shorted the green wire on the ATX plug to a black earth wire, the load (a few fans) connected to the PSU would turn on for a brief moment then turn off again.

P.S If you recently dropped a screw or something around your case, it could be that it's shorting out the back of the mobo (happened to me once). Try disassembling your PC completely and try booting with just the mobo, processor, and a single stick of RAM.