Hi All,

I thought I'd report back with the resolution to this mess. First of all, thanks to all the helpful suggestions.

My power supply was in fact bad. My power supply was under warranty, but Seasonic doesn't offer advanced shipping so, I had to buy a replacement from Fry's during the shipping of my defective one back to Seasonic.

When I installed the new power supply I bought from Fry's, this led me to discover that my Intel mother board was bad. This particular board has a post test card built into it and the hex codes weren't even being displayed. The board was still under the 3 year warranty (by a couple months). I called Intel and they advanced shipped me a replacement. After I installed the new mother board, the onboard diagnostics indicated that the CPU was defective. I again called Intel since the CPU was also still under warranty. Again, Intel advanced shipped me a replacement CPU. After I installed the new CPU, the system booted back to Windows 7. Whoo whoo!

After getting back to "normal", I also discovered that my DVD burner was also blown out. No big deal since I hardly use it, but I have one on order from Newegg.

I have to admit that Intel was very good at handling my warranty support and didn't give me the run around in any way. However, I did have to pay $25 to advance ship each part overnight, otherwise it would have taken several days for each item.
The Seasonic power supply, while a great product, had very poor customer service. I wouldn't recommend Seasonic power supplies due to their very poor customer support (no advanced shipping and email only support which took several days for them to respond to).

It was a nightmare couple of weeks, but I'm back to where I was. I'm so glad I had absolutely no data loss (however, I do run my drives in a RAID 1 mirror and take daily and weekly backups).

I've been in IT a long(!) time and the last time I saw this kind of cascade hardware failure on a PC was in the 486 days!

Thanks!
Peter

On 4/22/2014 3:38 PM, Wayne Davis wrote:

The advise of check the PSU is the easiest to test, especially if you have a spare. Bad PSU's can do all kinds of weird stuff. Test by using another PSU.

ONE WORD OF CAUTION: SOME DELL PSU's are not wired the normal way. If your system is one of them, and you put in a standard PSU, you CAN destroy the PSU AND the MB. Be careful about that. Check online if you think you may have a DELL MB/PSU,

On 04/21/2014 10:18 PM, AZ Pete wrote:
Hi All,

I'm having serious hardware issues with my main dev box and it is now completely down.
It's a fairly high end custom system (RAID, custom cooling, etc) that I built myself and has been quite stable for several years.
The box powers up and the LEDs on the motherboard light. But it never reaches POST.
The M/B has an LED that displays the boot hex codes on the board as it goes thru POST. Nothing is being displayed.
I've tried pulling out the video card and disconnecting all the peripherals, but that didn't help.

I'm thinking that the motherboard may be the problem.
I'd like to take it in for service to have it properly diagnosed. Does anyone know of any good hardware repair places in town?
I was thinking of Data Doctors, but don't know if they are capable to handle something that is not from a major manufacturer.
Is Fry's Electronics any good?

Any help would be most appreciated. And the faster the better. :)

Thanks for your help.
Peter
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