Traust@alien.topBtoTech Support•My (now ex) girlfriend poured soda all over my PC, now it won't turn on. How do I figure out which parts are truly broken and need replacement vs which ones are fine?English
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1 year agoPower supply could be dust, or potentially break later on so I would replace that to be sure.
Motherboard, good chance that fried.
CPU, GPU & RAM, possible but may still be good.
Since it was soda and no idea where it may of spread I would strip the whole computer down and wash everything with isopropyl alcohol using a soft toothbrush. Then I would start building the computer out of the case putting together the basics first, power supply & motherboard, do a test boot does it start up, no then replace. Go from there, if you still have old parts use that to test to see if it that part that is stuffed.
I would highly recommend investing in a NAS or even a DAS which has been set up with RAID 5 or similar. You can set this up yourself using something like TrueNAS or UnRaid and an old computer. The advantage of having a RAID setup is if one drive fails you don’t lose everything and you can just replace the dead drive and allow the data to be repopulated.
I’ve been using a Synology 8 bay NAS for almost 10 years and had one drive fail which I replaced without losing any data. That said having a 16TB drive as your primary drive and then having the other drives setup in a RAID configuration as a backup for the other drive is the better option as it will allow for backups should the 16TB crash.