I started the tread about my fried computer almost a month ago. at the time i thought that my computer was fried with a lightning strike. I decided to post what i found so that others might benefit. I am sure that the experts here already know all of this, but for this clueless user, this is something i learned (it does not apply in all situations!):

if your computer can't boot up (after a thunderstorm), it helps if you unplug it, open it up and pull out the BIOS battery, wait 10 minutes and put it back.

if you pulled out the BIOS battery and put it back, make sure you edit the BIOS settings after that and that they correspond to your configuration. For ex: i had a REIT(sp?)0 setup with dual hard drives. when i disconnected the BIOS battery, i did not look at the settings, the default was SATA and my BIOS never found my hard drives. once this was corrected, the computer booted up easily.

if your computer boots up after all of that, don't assume that all is well. i started to run the scandisk this morning and there are bad sectors on the hard drive. i will have to see how bad that is and decide if they still need to be replaced after all.

the good news is that my data was not lost, so i was already able to back it up on another drive.

and last and the most important
Back up your data on a regular basis. you never know when a lightning is going to strike!

Hello Ebaskin, Welcome back to the forum!

I have marked your thread as open so a tech will be with you as soon as possible

Regards,

Smokeycheech

P.S thanks for the tip

Changed Tag to INFORMATION. No assistance required here