No Power - 2005 Cavalier

The extra load on the CD player probably melted the insulation on the power wire which then shorted to ground. Check the CD wiring for melted insulation. Disconnect the battery and charge it. Then connect a twelve volt light in series with the battery to see if there is a constant electrical drain. If there is, fix it.

the test light draw test went out with points and carbs

you must use an ampmeter

typically you will show ~50ma with the computer alive,

12-20 ma for 10 to 20 min after the car is shut off

and 5-10ma after the computer "goes to sleep"

for example if your lights are left on, the computer shuts them off after 20min, but doesn't "go to sleep", and remains in a high draw state.

with a test light test the computer tries to boot up, and "shows a draw at the light"

It would help if you had the electrical schematics for this year car. Find out what local library has automotive help manuals. Mitchell or Motor are a couple of publishers. Some library subscribe to Alldata, on line manuals. Learn your system there!

The CD/radio are a fused unit. You may be dealing with anti theft situation.

Good luck.

That radio should have at the most a 15A fuse on the radio. I cant imagine that the CD player would be able to pull enough current to start burning up harnesses without blowing the fuse. But- anything is possible. I had a Toyota pickup that did almost the same thing when the remote (acc+) wire intermittently shorted out because of a lousy radio install by the previous owner. As the Gunny said- check the radio harness and connector- if you dont have money to fix right now and can live withour tunes you should just be able to isolate the short by fixing it, or you can just cut the wires before the short (providing they dont go anywhere else important past there).

If this was the original stereo and you are equipped with a theft deterrent system, It may be that the alarm is preventing the car from being able to start. Sometimes there is a jumper set up in the stereo that tells the cars computer that it has been stolen and locks out the entire system.

I guess it just took it a while to realize it was gone.

Other than that I would follow the able advice from previous posts.

If all you have is a test light, you can start at the battery, and work to the alternator, then the heavy red power wires feeding the fusible links. From there head to the fuse box to see if anything is live. Good luck.

Well I feel for you learned this one the hard way too had a 2004 in which the stereo was stolen out of it. The car did start for my kid when he went to go home but was unable to start it the next day. There is an anti theft link with your stereo. also when you took it out you probably found the old 10 pounds of sh-t in a 5 pound pail between the radio and the firewall. When we put a replacement in it still would not work. What I eventually found was that there is a secondary harness connection that is under the dash that was partially disconnected. Good Luck and not much room for big hands with out pulling the dash

Here is another story true or not I dont know but it can be. One man was fixing his toaster. One wire in the element was cut, he managed to connect the wire again and then plugged the toaster to the socket and threw in two slices of bread. As soon as he pulled down the arm on his toaster there was a blackout. When he got up to reset the fuse he saw that there was no light outside in the next house, no light in the whole neighbor hood , no light at all. In fact there was blackout in all southern part of Sweden. At the same time he pulled the toaster arm down there was a major failure in the high voltage system in the country and Boom... blackout. It just happened at the same time.

Conclution: It is possible that the CD failure has nothing to do with the shutdown of your car.