Reset System Password now system dead! Help!!

OK I have a system that was donated to me because the kid that had it thought it was dead, it is a home built system with an AMD Athlon on a Matsonic MS8308EP Mobo and I think the CPU is a Athlon XP not sure because of the problems, anyhow it seems that someone added a few goodies to this, it has 2 cd drives and one is a burner, , and a Mad Dog AGP 64mb video card, along with the usual NIC, modem, etc. Now there was no hard drives in it, the kid that had it, when it stopped working , (according to his friend) bought another computer pulled the hard drive and gave it to the friend to fix or trash, the friend played around with it couldn't get it to work at all asked me if I wanted it, so in the true spirit of Geekhood I said yes (I never turn down computer stuff) brought it home and plugged a hard drive into it, now this thing has a cheap tin very light power supply in it and 256mb of RAM , I tried it sure enough nothing, so I took it apart and got down to where someone had unpluged the little plug for the power switch and then when they were done playing with it pluged it into the HDD led pins and the HDD LED was plugged into to pins that are not marked at all, plugged them back to where they went and the system came to life, but it seems the setup was screwed up bad, all it would do is try to boot to the floppy drive and nothing else, it would not recognize either of the CD drives as boot devices, and the hard drive I put in was blank so nothing to see there either, no biggie go into setup and change the config, and boot from a bootable CD, when I restarted the system I pressed DEL as it says on the screen, it asked for a password, nope I aint got it, called my friend, nope, he called the guy he got it from nope it never asked before, OK tried all the default AMI passwords I could find, that didn't work either. Now I have two choices I have to reset the password to get into setup, first is the jumper pins but the MS8308EP mobo does not have these, so the only other choice is to do it the old fashion way, unplug it, remove the MOBO battery and let it sit for a while, I did and reinstalled the battery, plugged it back in and turned it on, dead, no nothing! No power supply fan runing, no lights, no cpu fan, like the Power supply instantly died! tried another outlet, same results, is it just me or is all this a little strange, now with all the stuff in it, I striped out the video card, all the PCI cards and left it just minium before all this started because I didn't want to have to contend with reasource conflicts etc, until I got the basic system up and going, so all it was was 1 stick of RAM, 1 floppy, 1 CD drive 1 hard drive formated blank, so it's dead, now while I was sitting here waiting for the CMOS and BIOS to drain, I did notice where it looks like someone spilled something on the AGP added in video card, so I was glas that I didn't put it back in, but given the location of the video card (right under the power supply I am wondering if someone spilt something into the power supply, now I know thats the easy way to look at it, but it does not explian why it worked right up till I drianed the CMOS/BIOS. IS anyone familiar with this MOBO or have any ideas what happened, I can change the power supply but I don't have another that will work on it laying around here right now and before I buy one I want to make sure, in systems that I have seen die instantly like this before it's a fried MOBO, now I know that my friends intrest in this was for OCing and I wonder if someone did end up frying the MODO from a bad OC job, and I was lucky enough to be there when it cooked! But the power supply still should come on? Any help here would be great, it has some possibilities for a decent 2nd system!

 

Dont know nothing about the MOBO, but if you moved the clear cmos jumper, and forgot to move it back to the original pins it will do what is happening. ed

 

Nope there is no CMOS reset on this board, I had to do it the old fashion way, remove the battery. I have just finished trying another power supply, and same thing, I think the MOBO is toast.

 

You might want to look at this link,

http://www.matsonic.com/mb/faqsdata/ms8308_series_faqs.htm

 

Yeah I found that earlier today a lot of good stuff and it's what helped me get all the little plugs right. Thanks

 

the issue you had point right to blown caps, look to see if there are any

 

The power supply may have been short circuited because of the spilling. Another possibility is that the internal fuse blew (if present). Either case, it may be a coincidence it happened right when clearing the CMOS.

http://www.fonerbooks.com/power.htm

 

OK a follow up just to close the thread...
After an autopsy on the remains my best guess after looking at the involved parts is....
I small part near the voltage regulator on the 12vdc leg burned up, bad enough that I can't even tell what the part was, I imagine a capacitor, anyhow it appears that when that happened it sent incorrect voltage to the motherboard and killed it as well, I could not find any scorch marks on the mobo, but after trying a known good power suply the results were the same. Somewhere along the way I think that it was overclocked to the point where it took out the cheap power supply and then it destroyed the board before the whole thing died. I am not sure if the spilling contributed to this or not, but judging from the location of the burned up part in the power supply belive it might have been although the closeness of this part to the voltage regulator makes me think that a spill may have gotten onto the leads of the voltage regulator and then in turn fried the small part, and the board at the same time.
There are more good stories that have appeared lately, the guy that pugged in a new DVD burner while his machine was running, and saw a spark, then everything quit...DVD drives are not hot swapable, The guy that wanted to make sure his USB mouse was plugged all the way in till he shoved the port out onto his motherboard and fried the mobo, the moron from the Geeks Squad at best buy that said nothing was wrong with a computer boot couldn't get it to boot either, and after 3 hours decided that yeah there might be something wrong with the computer...
The main fun in this business is to see what happens next!