Friends motherboard doesn't get past post.

It was working fine UNTIL
        He piggybacked an IOMEGA ZIP through the parallel port of a SYQUEST FLYER
while the computer was off.  He booted and rec'd only video card info then
it froze. He turned it off, then unhooked IOMEGA, turned it on and rebooted
and only had red light hard drive and green from CD-ROM for a few seconds.
I went over and looked at it and saw the same thing, noted that fan to cpu
was running, but no info was displayed on screen.
        Just got off the phone with him to ask him if light on keyboard came on
(wondering about post test) and he said nothing was happening. He plugged
the power back up since I had disconnected it, then he turned it on and did
not even get the red hd light.
        Then only wild guess I can make is the IOMEGA sent power through the
parallel port and did bad things to the motherboard, such as the bios, or
the power supply went flaky.  Any guesses would be appreciated.

        His system:
                MTech R548
                Cyrix Mx-233
                Maxtor 6.4 g IDE
                Generic S3 PCI Video
                CD-ROM
                AWARD bios

Thanks,         Nick R.