Oh what a dilema...P4 no worky...what to do now?

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I recently wrecked a pefectly good motherboard trying to install a cd burner in an empty drive bay. To make a long story short the new burner was too long and damaged a capasitor on the mb when I forced the unit in through the bay opening. Windows xp rebooted okay and acknowledged the new drive, but needed to be restarted again. Which I did, but then it refused afterwords to boot at all. I figured it must have been due to the damaged cap. Repeated attempts to restart did nothing. Then later on the cap. actually popped off the board, so I'm guessing the board is FUBAR.

No biggy, but now I'm wondering if I should just buy another board or just replace the pc altogether. As far as I know the board is a PM-880 Intel P4 type; do they still make or sell this type of board? I can probably reuse most of the old stuff like the processor, mem, etc. What do you guys think? Tanks, BNG.

[TheJamsh]

get a capacitor and solder it on

[technoid]

Looks like a VIA PM880, after Googling.  Unless you know what that cap does/did it's hard to tell how the motherboard died. and you would be hardpressed to find the schematics at all for a PC motherboard from the mfr, much less know how to read it (if you're not an engineer/techie).  If it's one of those caps near the CPU or memory slots, assuming they're closer to the drive bays in an [upright] tower, then you'd be assured those 2 are at least affected to get the board to boot.   You can tell me the cap's designation if you'd like and where it is, but can't really help you further. 

Since it's dead anyway, afayk, try what was recommended, find another cap of the same capacitance (and vdc).  I'm assuming it's one of those big cylindrical electrolytic caps (likely polarized).  Do some more Googling. I didn't find any on eBay.  If you want this board badly, then contact a repair service, otherwise buy a new board.  eBay would be your best bet.  I see lots of P4 mobo's there, new/used/refurbished.