EP45-DQ6 fried?

I was installing a thermalright ultra 120 on my giga ep45-dq6 but it would fail post everytime and I can only think it was because it was shorting out somewhere. I reinstalled the stock intel cooler and straight away it posts again but now hangs.

With the old stock cooler on, it may post but it fails to detect any hard drive (ide) I even attached a couple of old hard drives & changed the cable and still nothing.

It says Verifying DMI pool data Boot from CD/DVD then DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK... So I insert the xp disk and eventually it says no hard drive was detected.

I've only got a single ide hard drive attached, theres no jumper settings as its the only HDD, its set as the primary boot device and is set to auto-detect.

In the end only 2 things were changed, there was a new cooler attached and then the old 1 put on and the cmos was reset. Before all this the system was all working fine which is why I think I fried my mobo, only thing left I can think of. I havn't flashed BIOS yet but I don't think it will change anything. Any
ideas/thoughts?

Boot problems
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] t-problems

I think that if you are POSTing, your motherboard is OK.

I also checked your very througher quide (cheers) and mine all passes apart from the standoffs but that hes never been a problem in the past.

No I mean I've tested the system outside of the case over a plastic backing and the results are the same.