PC Freezes/BSODs after fuse blew-What's broken?

We blew a fuse, which we've done a few times in the past with no problems, but after this time my comptuer won't from the HDD (XP Pro) without BSODing, even in safe mode. The farthest it got after a few tries was the desktop (in safe mode), but I didn't have a chance to do anything before a BSOD. So I tried a repair install of windows. The first time it recognized windows was installed on the drive, but when I tried a repair insatall it froze while copying the files from the CD. Take two, windows now didn't see itself on the partition (but it did know it was NTFS). So instead of risking further damage to all the un-backed up (><) files on it, I decided to play it safe and format the IDE drive I had (but was not plugged in at the time), then back up from there. I tried this 2 or 3 times, and it froze again once, and BSODd the rest. After digging around for a few minutes I found an old Ubuntu live CD. However, I was unable to boot from it, or install it to the HDD (I got a unhelpful error (to me at least) usually involving yikes or uh-oh; I'll get an exact message if someone wants it). So next I tried DSL (Damn Small Linux), and got it to boot to a desktop, but after a minute or two it would always freeze. What could've gone wrong? I wouldn't think it'd be the HDDs, since CD boots didn't work either, and an outside HDD failed as well. As for the VC (6600GT), I switched it out with an older, slightly broken 9800Pro, and still no luck. 5 passes of memtest86 (on a gig of PQI Turbo series) gave no errors, and it was from the BIOS (of a DFI 250GB), so I don't think that could be it. This just leaves PSU, could this cause my freezing/BSODing? Seems likely to me, but I don't have an old one laying around, so I can't test this easily. If it is though, I won't have anything against replacing my old one (480w TT something), but I'd like a second opinion before I go out and buy a nice one.

possibly you have managed to corrupt the OS..

Was the computer on when this happened? If it was, I'd almost think it might be the board itself. I had a board fail after a similar incident but, it was doing something different. After the power failure, it would no longer see the slave drives on both the IDE channels. No matter what I did, it would only see one drive on each channel.

Long story short, I had to replace the board.

Yea, my guess from what you have said would be the MB or PSU. I would try the PSU first, as it is much simpler to swap out.

Fingers crossed for ya bro.

Adragontattoo said:

possibly you have managed to corrupt the OS..

Click to expand...

Except it can't boot from a Windows CD or two linux distros..

I'll try a new PSU soon then. Hopefully that's the problem.