Electrical storm took out my XP box

beans

Got arth-a-ritis
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I'm having to use my wife's laptop for this because after the big storm Friday night my XP machine is kaput. I have it plugged into a battery backup that did its job long enough so I could shut it down properly after the lights went out but when they came back on, NOTHING.... pushed the power ON button and nothing happened. Been wanting upgrade anyway but if these 2 hard drives are dead, I'm screwed. The power supply is fine and there are no fuses on the board to blow out. Can anyone think of anything else I can try to revive this thing?
 
If the power button doesn`t work then more than likely it took out the power supply for the computer. Do you have another computer other than a laptop or know someone with a spare power supply you can put in the computer to see if you can get it to fire up?
 
If absolutely nothing happens I would lean twoard a bad motherboard. Take the whole thing to a good computer tech and pray they can recover it if that is not the case!

Sorry to hear, that sucks.
 
If the power button doesn`t work then more than likely it took out the power supply for the computer. Do you have another computer other than a laptop or know someone with a spare power supply you can put in the computer to see if you can get it to fire up?

I tried another power supply and no change. I vacuumed all the dust out of the case and checked the connections. Thanks for the help, guys.
 
It's a bad idea to vacuum inside a case. It can create static buildup and ruin sensitive components.
 
Get an external USB hardrive attache thing from newegg.com and get your data. Then mess with the computer.
 
I hate those UPS things. Somehow they tend to mess up stuff plugged into them somehow. Even without a surge!
 
I hate those UPS things. Somehow they tend to mess up stuff plugged into them somehow. Even without a surge!

I've never had a problem with one. You just have to follow two simple rules - make sure the UPS has adequate power to drive whatever is plugged into it, and DON'T plug a laser printer (or laser fax machine) into one.
 
Go to Newegg.com and search on VANTEC CB-ISATAU2. It's a usb adapter for both IDE and SATA drives. With luck, you will be able to access the drives.

Not to be harsh, but if you don't have backups of the data on your drives this was going to happen sooner or later. You can blame the UPS if you want but you would be wrong. Drives fail, and the lack of a proven good backup of the data is the operator's fault.
 
Have you tried plugging it directly into the wall? Maybe your UPS fried.

Sure did... no joy.
Yesterday after talking it over at Fry's with a tech that was once a neighbor of ours and now seems pretty knowledgeable, I decided to go on and get a new board. I've needed to upgrade for a while now, and for $375 I got an Intel Core Duo 2.7 GHz processor, 4 GB memory, and a 1.5 TB SATA drive. So I got that all set up and plugged in my old drive using an IDE to SATA adapter.
Now the problem is that I can't boot from that drive because the BIOS doesn't see the IDE drive at all... but Windows can. So I installed XP on the new drive and took a look at the old drive. There were very few errors on the disk but I'm being denied access to my old My Documents directory :mad: I can access everything but that.
One stupid thing I was doing is leaving it turned on for days at a time, but I had Microsoft Update automatically installing updates and rebooting. The other stupid thing I did was to let my C: drive get way too full.
So I am back up, but I've gotta recover that old data somehow. Anybody now of a good utility program I can try? I scanned it with Norton 360 and CHKDISK but still can't even look at my old data.
 
One stupid thing I was doing is leaving it turned on for days at a time, but I had Microsoft Update automatically installing updates and rebooting. The other stupid thing I did was to let my C: drive get way too full.

Actually the only stupid thing you did was to not back up your data. Every disk drive sold comes with a parameter in the specification called MTBF - Mean Time Between Failure. Every disk fails, and accidents that happened to you happen every day. Its just a matter of time before your data becomes unaccessable.

So I am back up, but I've gotta recover that old data somehow. Anybody now of a good utility program I can try? I scanned it with Norton 360 and CHKDISK but still can't even look at my old data.

Go to http://accessdata.com/downloads.html and scroll down to FTK imager. First step is to make an image of that folder. You'll need a drive with enough space on it to store that miage. Then use FTK Imager to mount the image you just created, and export your My Documents folder back out.
 
You're right... I'd been thinking about how I need to do backups. I think my most recent backups are about a year old. The good news is that hardware-wise the drive is fine. According to Norton 360 the files are all there, I just can't see them.
Anybody remember the filename extension Outlook uses for its data file?
 
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The file is a .pst file found under C:\documents and settings\username\local settings\application data\microsoft\outlook

My philosophy of hard drives is that all of them are failing. I've seen them go 10 years, and I've seen them fail after 3 months. It doesn't matter if you are using a top of the line brand new drive. If you don't have a backup, you are risking it. Even with RAID, power surges can fry all the disks.

I have used a program called Spinrite on the "Hiren's Boot Disc" to repair a filesystem enough to get into it and copy the data.
 
I'm having to use my wife's laptop for this because after the big storm Friday night my XP machine is kaput. I have it plugged into a battery backup that did its job long enough so I could shut it down properly after the lights went out but when they came back on, NOTHING.... pushed the power ON button and nothing happened. Been wanting upgrade anyway but if these 2 hard drives are dead, I'm screwed. The power supply is fine and there are no fuses on the board to blow out. Can anyone think of anything else I can try to revive this thing?

:sigh: Sorry to hear about your pc, same thing I did couple of years ago, fried both power-supply and motherboard during a bad storm.
Nowdays I unplug every pc and router + phone line when thunder rolls in.
No more chances with surge protectors and lightning + all data backed up on a external HD once a week.
Like the darn storm we had here this afternoon...:eek:
 
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