USB short frying my mobo/cpu/ram?

Hey folks,

Has anyone ever heard of this happening? I found an article online that says it does happen rarely and sometimes will even fry the optical drives.

I think this may have happened to me and I've verified that my optical drives still work but can anyone help me with advice on how to determine if the mobo, ram and cpu are ok?

Thanks,
LF

 

i connected a digital camera to a firewire port, turned on the camera to download pics, bang, fried a 300.00 motherboard. bad firewire port, supposedly wired wrong at the factory.
i suspect usb could do the same thing.
i did get an identical board off ebay, installed new memory, etc . just to be safe.
good luck

 

So you have a dead computer Could you expand on how exacty the computer died and what the computer currently does

 

Ricky,

Thanks for the reply... here's my tale of woe:

The computer in question is and HP a335w desktop. P4 2.5GHz, 1GB RAM, 160 GB HD, Matrox 16MB dual monitor PCI card running XP Home. As I was trying to plug in a USB device my computer shut down and hasn't been able to boot since. There was an error message that popped up but I didn't really get a chance to read it. I believe it had something to do with a power issue.

When I try to boot it up, I get a strange beep code. It will beep once like a normal start up but then it beeps very rapidly in succession and will eventually sound like one continuous beep. It's an Asus motherboard and HP's website lists the BIOS as ASUS/Award and I've googled these companies for beeps codes and nothing like the beeps I'm experiencing is listed.

Initially, I thought it was the PSU changed it (actually got a new case with psu in it and moved everything over to it. But the same beeps are there. Here's what I have done to try and pin down the problem:

Attempted to boot:

1)With no peripheral cards... same beep
2)Without RAM...beep code indicating absence of RAM
3)With a friend's RAM ... 256MB- nothing, wouldn't boot and no beep
512MB- same as when I started (one beep then continuous)
4)Without CPU... nothing, no beeps.

Can anyone tell me what the problem is from what I've described? Or, perhaps suggest another way for me to determine what component is faulty and needs replacing? I hope to take my RAM and try it in a friend's computer so I will be able to see if that's ok.

Thanks again,
LF

 

Sorry for the late reply left,sorry to hear of your trouble,I also unfamiliar with your beep code,I'v also checked over hp and ASUS's site no luck.

Have you tried a basic cmos reset