Help!!! Power outage or Spike FRIED my PC's?

[Hughhefner]

Hello Everyone, I'm in the midwest near chicago and earlier this week we had ALOT of rain and thunderstorms... NO POWER OUTAGES that I could notice but thay could have happened during the night.. Here's what happend, I have or rather HAD 3 pc's running for overclockers team SETI.. Rig #1 is An AMD Tbred-b 2100 on an Epox kt400 motherboard running windows XP, the system REBOOTED during the night--I found it sitting on the Password login screen when I checked it in the morning, just entered the password and she sprung to life--NO big deal-- the rig is hooked to a decent memorex Surge unit and I did not have to reset the surge breaker.... Rig #2--- Amd t-bredb 2100 on an epox 8RDA+ running 2287, system APPEARED DEAD!!!, power and reset buttons did NOT work, switching on/off the power supply switch did NOT work, the NIC card led light would STILL glow showing power was being received... I had to reset the BIOS jumper to get the system to boot and here where things get interesting--- Reset the bios date to current BUT windows ME showed the date as 2082 and totally changed my settings like A. COOKIES all of a sudden were not working-- all my usual websites did not recognize me like EBAY and such, had tochange settings, some VIDEO games are no longer working--Starfleet command III does not work even after uninstalling and reinstalling.. I had my Norton System works run a scan and it had to fix over 248 errors--holy sh---!

System 3--Appears DOA as well, AMD t-bred 1700 on an IWILL xp333r--

MIND you that systems 2-3 were hooked up to Very expensive Surge protectors--- 2 in a row and the protectors did not have to be reset
Could this be caused by something coming thu my DSL line? My router is fine so I don't get it, maybe some else has had this happen... There is antivirus software completely updated on the system that receives e-mail and it did not find any viruses...

 

[Ffats]

Wow, sorry about your dilemma - I live in the Chicago area and I got pretty worried about the storm, so I shut off my main comp. 5 minutes later, power spike hit my house and everything flickered... I was lucky.

Anyway, I don't think it would be the DSL's problem, as the router (and I'm assuming modem) work fine. IMO, that rules that out.

I do have to say that you need to contact the manufacturers of your surge protectors, as you say they were pricey. I know that some companies have a damage promise. Although cheaper companies won't do anything for you if the computer boots up: they assume nothing is wrong. Although, mention that your hard drive was damaged.

Memorex's Tech Support:
[email protected]
(They've also got some online tech support you may want to check out)

Your resetting the BIOS would mess up the clock and calendar... but as for cookies and games, that would point to your hard drive not having such a good day.

Hope this helps!
-Ffats

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

yes, many power bar makers will insure u upto x dollars, most i have seen are up to $5k worth if you items are damaged.

 

[Hughhefner]

Just seems strange that all 3 pc were hit even thru 2 surge protectors yet nothing else in my house was effected like my 6 fish tank filters or appliances that are all plugged in..