Unable to read hard drive.  New power supply.  Dell says motherboard and CPU blown along with hard drive..."Send Money".  The question is...If I were to connect another hard drive to the unit to see if the lights come on and power supply fan turns on, could I destroy the new hard drive?  Also, I cannot see anywhere on the mother board where heat has caused a problem, and the Intel P4 CPU might(?) still be OK.  In any case, could it be possible to try another hard drive without trashing it?

Quoted from halfquid Unable to read hard drive.  New power supply.  Dell says motherboard and CPU blown along with hard drive..."Send Money".  The question is...If I were to connect another hard drive to the unit to see if the lights come on and power supply fan turns on, could I destroy the new hard drive??

Yes.  I don't think that it's very likely, but since exactly that happened to me once, I wouldn't recommend trying.  On the other hand, you could try an old hard drive full of garbage.  In any case, if all you want to check are basic components and functions like the power supply and some minimal MB function, you can power up the machine without any hard drive.  This is in fact a normal procedure for non-professionals building their own machines, i.e., powering up the system for test purposes when it consists only of an MB with CPU, RAM, and power supply.

Quoted from halfquid Also, I cannot see anywhere on the mother board where heat has caused a problem, and the Intel P4 CPU might(?) still be OK.

What you can't see proves little.  The CPU and many other semiconductor components can be damaged by heat too low to leave burn marks, etc.  In fact, the "pop" suggests that the damage was not done by heat over a significant area, but by a power surge somewhere, which can destroy by very local heat inside a component, or by more direct disruption of the semiconductor.  However, since you're talking about a lot of money, and I don't trust the big computer companies farther than I can throw them, I would try to power up the machine before paying Dell to replace most of it, either with a garbagy old hard drive or with none at all.

Good luck.
Cassy.

   Do not try another hard drive.  If the power supply is bad, it is probably feeding the wrong voltage or amps to the components.  If you hook up a hard drive and it feeds it the wrong amount of electricity, it could blow too.
   The easiest thing to do would be to buy a new computer.
   You could try removing the hard drive or other parts from the blown computer and try them on a different computer (preferably an older computer which you wouldn't mind messing up).

Thanks people, for your input.  It appears the BIOS on the motherboard, and the CPU have seen hotter times, so I took their burnt buns to the local HAZMAT place, got enough workers for kaddish, and went back home.  This site is truely a remarkable place, and most helpful.