We recently had a power outage on my block (a common thing on our street for some reason). This one was longer than average, though, and we were without power for about 18 hours. For some reason, when the power came back on, my parent's computer wouldn't boot. This is bad. These days there are some pretty serious things they need their computer for, and with my wedding only a week away, they're busier than ever.

We're not sure why it happened, either. It wasn't a storm that caused it (it hadn't rained for days), and the computer was on an APC unit. But now, the computer won't even power up. I hit the power button and absolutely nothing happens. The only indicator I have is that one of the two NICs on the motherboard has an amber light that keeps flashing when the computer is plugged in. I've looked at the documentation that came with the motherboard and the power supply, but they don't say anything at all.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'd be extremely grateful if you did. Things are, as you can imagine, crazy enough around here already without this thrown in.

*edit*
Also, if anyone can find a manual for the MSI K8N Neo4 motherboard online, I'd appreciate it. Despite the indications that it came with a manual, I can't find one, even though I keep everything.

Oh, and if it helps, the power supply is an Antec NeoPower 480.

A new Dell dual core AMD machine with 1GB of memory was going for $329 last week. At those prices, I'm no longer willing to spend a whole lot of time troubleshooting old hardware.

Other than that, I can only give you the standard advice, start from the wall and work backwards. You can't tell anything about the motherboard until you swap out the power supply. The only other thing to try is to disconnect everything that's plugged into the motherboard that you can and see if one of them is preventing it from starting up.

Let us know how your APC five million dollar lifetime connected equipment warranty works out.

Matthew

If it's plugged into some kind of surge protector I would bypass that for the first thing. Second I would try a different powersupply.

After tracing from the wall to the PSU (just plug the damn thing into a different outlet, with no APC UPS, and no surge gizmos), the next step is to open it up and unplug all PCI/AGP cards.

Try it like that, then add back only the most absolutely essential cards -- likely just the video card. If the mainboard has built-in video, then USE THAT instead.

Cheers

There is one stupid stunt you can try, unplug the computer from the wall, press down on the power button for about 30 seconds, then plug it back in, and try to turn it in.

Or, at this point, put its hard drive into another machine to extract the time sensitive data. Worry about booting it later.

Good luck.