Lightning strike diagnosis

[westmass]

While I was away from home, my family says a storm came though and lightning struck closeby. My computer seems to be dead. No lights, no nothing. I tried shorting the power switch pins on the motherboard to see if the switch was faulty, but no luck.

There is about 5 volts on the purple wire on the 24 pin connector from the psu to the MOBO, and about 2.7 volts on the green wire with the plug disconnected from the motherboard. No other wires show voltage. The psu does power up another computer, but I didn't take the time to swap everything over to see if it runs the old box perfectly.

Can anyone point me to a systematic way to check each component without simply buying replacements? While I suspect the motherboard is likely damaged, is there a way to check it? There aren't any obvious signs of damage, no scorching or strange smells.

Many thanks for taking the time to read this...

 

[TonCharr28]

The minimum to get your motherboard working properly for a test is a CPU and memory. So if everything works under that setup, you can tick off those three, and can run through the other components.

I'm not sure though how to properly test the motherboard itself, not to mention the CPU and memory. Maybe you can borrow a motherboard from a friend as a testbed?

 

[westmass]

Thanks for taking the time to respond TonCharr28,
I was able to get the power supply to power up another system, so according to what I read in another post about output votages, it appears to have made it through unscathed. I tried to boot the motherboard by shorting the pins for the power switch, but didn't have any luck. Armed with that information, I decided to order a replacement motherboard which should arrive early next week. I'll begin by seating the cpu and memory and see what happens. I'll post the results, hopefully on the problem system. Thanks again..

 

[westmass]

TonCharr28,

I swapped the motherboard with an exact replacement this morning. I got sidetracked a bit when I forgot to set the bios to RAID when I booted the first time. This resulted in a corrupted boot sector, and I had to get out my Vista installation CD to repair it. Other than that, the machine seems to be running well. No data loss as far as I can tell, and no other components appear to be affected. I'm not sure if it was a lightning strike or simply a coincidental motherboard failure.