PC Salvage operation goes awry

The_Scarab

In another thread somewhere yesterday I mentioned that my PC was ruined by spilled liquids while on. Several things blew like the HDDs and melted and shit and it was a mess.

Well I've been taking it apart today, trying to salvage components and was wondering if people could help diagnose issues as terminal or salvageable, seeing as I know little about regular hardware performance.


1) Removed HDDs and replaced. PC wont even boot to bios and keeps resetting every 5 seconds.

2) Swapped out the RAM and same issue occurs. Tried old ram in other machine and it seems to work fine.

3) Swapped out CPU and same problem.

Is this a motherboard issue you think? Or GPU perhaps (which is the only thing I cant swap out).

Was hoping to grab bag a few things from the wreckage but it looks like very little survived. I know the HDDs are written off, so too are both optical drives.

Just want to get into the bios to see what can and cant work out of whats left but it doesnt appear like I can even do that.

Technicality

What about the power supply? It might have been similarly damaged, or taken the multiple shorts to items it was powering badly. I wouldn't hold out much hope for the motherboard though.

Just_Bri_Thanks

Yeah, you can kiss the mobo goodbye. My recommendation is to plug the old components into a new mobo and see if anything works.

Edit: But examine the parts very very carefully first: if you see any discoloration on anything, don't use it.

Dixon

Oh yeah that mobo is gonna be dead, when you turn it on see any bright burning lights on the mobo kinda like phosphorus? I've seen that happen a few times when people have spilled stuff onto a case and its got onto the mobo shorting something.

The powersupply would also be good to check but I mean the mobo is standing out the most so it prob was that. The ram and cpu may still work, but i would try them on some piece of shit board if possible, if not just check for physical problems with the stuff and if you can't get a cheap board make sure it has a warranty when testing your old parts :P

zanetheinsane

What sort of liquids did you spill? If it was just water then a lot of the components can probably be saved, but if it was anything that had any sort of sugars or acids in it then anything it touched is pretty boned.

Transparent

At least it's not cat piss. A very unlikely combination of events seriously led to components in my computer being ruined by a cat spraying my computer. I think I've told the story of Feline Armageddon on these forums somewhere else, it was horrible.

Sounds like you got your computer pretty fucking wet if the hard and optical drives got wet enough to be affected. Could be any one or all three of your motherboard, gpu, and power supply.