Something just burnt out, not sure what

jamtheguitarman

jamtheguitarman

New member
So ive just moved house and set up all my gear, I turned on my DAW for the first time and it made that wooshy burn out sound and emiitted a burnt smell. It didnt seem to distract the computer, the normal startup procceedure still came up on both screens, I turned it off pretty quickly however.


I'm assuming it wasnt the power supply as the whole thing would just shut off right?

I opened up the case and smelt around a bit (oh yes - sophisticated fault finding is my forte:D), It seemd to be strongist around the video card/soundcard PCI boards.

Any Idea what could have burnt out like that?

Should I turn it on and see what happens? (maybe disconnect the hard drives just in case :confused:).


Cheers for any help.


(I'm in an internet cafe right now, no net at the new flat - will be on tommorow at my old place).
 
If it smells, you should be able to see it. Look for charred, blown or in other way different components. Also look for leaking capacitors or caps with open seals at the top.

But the thing that the computer seems to start up ok is weird, maybe it can be some of the fans or some of the non-crucial components in the PSU.

And by the way the smelling around is not a "lamer's technique", but actually used even by proffesionals, who can tell from the way it smells what kind of component has gone.
You can put your head deeper in the case and find the spot where it smells most. Look there for your burnt parts :)
 
Sounds like a capacitor me...were I work there have been 3 such capacitor failures on Motherboards in the last month...I would look for any Capacitors that are bulging , Leaking or have just plain exploded...if it is a capacitor and you are handy you might be able to fix it yerself by replaceing the capacitor with one of the same value...Yer PC "might" work fine with a bad capacitor as long as it isn"t shorted.....

:D
 
I would disconnect the hard drives for sure before starting it up again.

Unplug the computer and open it up. Do a visual inspection, you might see the problem component quite easily.

If there is something burnt out on a PCI board, I personally would remove that board and replace it. I'd rather have a board blow up than something on the motherboard, personally.
 
Back online for the weekend.

I took the PCI boards out and inspected them along with the motherboard, couldn't see anything out of the ordinary so I decided to put them back in and boot up.

It powered up and proceeded to the normal motherboard logo initializing screen thing - then came the dreaded "boot device not working..........please insert secondary...." so I put the Windows CD in the drive. That took me to a blue screen saying "Windows system" or something I don't recall seeing before, anyway it jammed on that.
I then restarted with the CD in and it booted to Windows, I looked about a bit and much to my surprise nothing seemed to be wrong. So what the hell............... I rebooted but this time as normal without the Windows CD in the drive.

dum dum dum

No problems.

That was over a week ago now, Ive had it on for a few long sessions since then and there doesn't seem to be anything different.

Puzzling :confused:
 
boot device not found is showing up because your main boot device is either defective or unplugged. The blue xp screen you saw was the windows setup screen and i definatley would NOT suggest going through that because you will lose everything on your pc

but since you fixed it i guess you figured that out lol
 
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