Chuck(G)
25k Member
Don't you just love it when manufacturers decide to shave a few pennies here and there? If Apple had used a shrouded header (costing a few cents more), it would have been impossible to do this.
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What your worst WHOOPS! or DOH! momment while working on a computer?
- Thread starter salamontagne
- Start date
Don't you just love it when manufacturers decide to shave a few pennies here and there? If Apple had used a shrouded header (costing a few cents more), it would have been impossible to do this.
cosam
Veteran Member
I just had a double whammy this evening. I took the LCD out of a monitor to give it a proper clean but forgot to replace the front panel's ribbon cable when putting it back together. I of course only noticed this after plugging in two video cables, three USB cables (it has a built in hub) and the power. As if that wasn't bad enough, after opening the thing up again, hooking up the panel cable and screwing it shut, it still didn't work. It was only when I opened it up the third time I noticed the main power rocker switch on the back of the unit was in the "off" position... At least there was no damage done and I've got a nice clear screen to show for it.
I don't recall "love" being the emotion I was experiencing at the moment
For all the money they saved on the shroudless header connector, they spent plenty more on socketing each and every IC on the board. The DiskII controller was being used in an Apple II+, which also had everything socketed... but in that case, it was an annoyance. The machine wouldn't work at first, and I soon self-discovered what I later learned was commonly known as the "Apple/Atari drop" although I didn't drop the board, and actually loosened, scraped clean and reinserted each IC in their sockets.
I'm not really sure what happened to that II+... I no longer have it anyway... my only Apple II now is a IIgs.
I was really surprised with that guy at Norvac though... he must have gotten a lot of calls from people smoking their DiskII controllers. Sadly, we don't have any spiffy places like Norvac where I am now... the nearest Frys is an hour away in Austin. I really miss Portland... had almost as many computer stores as gas stations, or sure seemed to anyway. *sigh*
At least Newegg ships pretty darn fast :D
Whenever the Army is done with me I might move back... have to see how those crazy house prices are then.
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Trevor
Druid6900
Veteran Member
Is that the motherboard that takes the ATX style PSU but with a 24 pin main connector?
paul
Veteran Member
Ah, yes, I made a similar mistake at the Windows Command line and managed to delete every track in my 18 GB MP3 collection with a "2" in the filename. And had no backup of course.
MikeS
Veteran Member
Ouch! I feel your pain ;-)
digger
Experienced Member
I'll have to correct you on that one: The Athlon64 had an on-die northbridge and it was connected directly to the memory banks, the expansion slots and the southbridge chip through the HyperTransport interface. Whatever that chip was you blew up, it couldn't have been the northbridge.
Anyway, an embarassing screw-up of my own was blowing up the PSU of a brand-new AT full-tower that I had bought to replace my cramped baby AT tower. This was some time around 1995, I believe.
I had the mains plugged into the PSU to ground myself while migrating the motherboard and other components over. Since this was an AT case, (this was before ATX became commonplace), its PSU had four of those crimped high-power wires that I was supposed to slide on the connectors of the on/off HARD-switch on the front of the case. These were on the high-power side of the PSU, and therefore had 220V AC on them. Normally, they would have those plastic isolators shoved on them, but a few of them had slid off a bit and made contact with the metal of the case while I was working on it.
BANG! Black-out in the entire house. Parents alarmed. The sound of me cursing loudly. You get the idea.
PSU dead. Of course in hindsight, perhaps I could've repaired the PSU by replacing the fuse, but at the time I was quite done with messing around with AC power. Also I'm not sure, but I believe I recall the dreaded smell coming from it, so it probably was more than just the fuse that I had destroyed. I ended up using the old PSU from my old case, which unfortunately was only 200W as opposed to the 230W one that I had blown up. The system worked fine with it, however.
Oh well, rather the PSU then the motherboard, or so I comforted myself. :D
Thinking back, I realize how stupid and dangerous that mistake was. At least with ATX PSUs, you don't have to deal with (partially) exposed high voltage wires anymore, although I do miss the good old hard circuit-breaking power switches on the front.
Jorg
Veteran Member
You must be right, I have to admit I've tried to erase it from memory...
It was this board:
(MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum), and it was the thing under the fan.
It was this board:
(MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum), and it was the thing under the fan.
digger
Experienced Member
Good choice. MSI generally made decent boards.
It's definitely the southbridge then. Other than the CPU, that's the only chip on the board that is even remotely complex enough to warrant an actively cooled heatsink of its own. Still, I suspect that fan was put there more for marketing purposes than out of necessity. If anything, it would only add to the overal noise of the system.
It's definitely the southbridge then. Other than the CPU, that's the only chip on the board that is even remotely complex enough to warrant an actively cooled heatsink of its own. Still, I suspect that fan was put there more for marketing purposes than out of necessity. If anything, it would only add to the overal noise of the system.
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I've had many chipset HSs die/gum up and start making a terrible racket. The first time, I tried lubricating it, but I didn't have anything except 3in1 or WD-40. I didn't feel like using the WD-40 and the 3in1 only lasted a few weeks at a time. After getting tired of that, I just unplugged the fan and was pleased to see it had no noticeable affect on the system at all.
Now whenever I have a HS fan die I just d/c it and haven't ever had any problems (yet, knock on wood). My current system is an Asus AMD 790G chipset board and Asus has decided to use a passive HS on the chipset, so at least I won't have to worry about it this time :D
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Trevor
Now whenever I have a HS fan die I just d/c it and haven't ever had any problems (yet, knock on wood). My current system is an Asus AMD 790G chipset board and Asus has decided to use a passive HS on the chipset, so at least I won't have to worry about it this time :D
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Trevor
linuxlove
Veteran Member
Mine? Trying to circuit-bend a Packard Bell. The CMOS battery was dead in it (didn't have knowledge of a soldering iron or this place then) so I stripped a wire and started having fun with the RAM chips. Then I decided to have fun with the chipset. I bricked it. Oh well, it was a Packard Bell anyway but I'm still looking for one of em...
I'm sure I've fried more stuff and don't remember but yeah early on I had my two bad "scripting" experiences but on the bright side it was just my systems. One was in Windows (I was young but figured I knew what I was doing) and wanted to automatically clear my temporary internet files with a batch file (NT 4.0 and found that IE's clean (still) doesn't delete all the files if it decides to create new directories over time). Long story short, created a dumb .bat file to cd into the tempor~1 folder, then cd randomdirname (I wrote the 4 of them down) del /s /q *.* then cd .. and do it for the other 3 dirs. Sure enough one day they changed (?!) so my bat file did exactly what I asked. cd dirname (directory not found) del /s /q *.*: cd ..: (now in my application data dir) del /s /q *.*: cd.. (now in my profile) ... now in c:\.. Fun! Deleted an operating system while running it Way to streamline my OS. The helpdesk laughed when I had to call them to get my drive re-imaged (they knew me anyway and yeah it was funny if you thought about it). Since I still had the OS up I asked if I could try fixing it myself while I waited and they didn't care, so I was able to map my bosses drive and I copied his windows dir to mine and fixed at least Windows but other applications still needed reinstalling so I couldn't do that. I spent the next few days waiting for the helpdesk so I wrote a few games and other garbage while waiting.
The common one in nix which I knew about but still ended up doing (manually at least) was knowing not to blow away a user and have it automatically delete their user directory. (Some users if the system is poorly managed have / for their home). Smart enough not to do that.. but was tired and frustrated when trying to delete a home directory that started in .username so of course rm -rf .* and it hit . and .. (oops)
Way to streamline my OS. The helpdesk laughed when I had to call them to get my drive re-imaged (they knew me anyway and yeah it was funny if you thought about it). Since I still had the OS up I asked if I could try fixing it myself while I waited and they didn't care, so I was able to map my bosses drive and I copied his windows dir to mine and fixed at least Windows but other applications still needed reinstalling so I couldn't do that. I spent the next few days waiting for the helpdesk so I wrote a few games and other garbage while waiting.The common one in nix which I knew about but still ended up doing (manually at least) was knowing not to blow away a user and have it automatically delete their user directory. (Some users if the system is poorly managed have / for their home). Smart enough not to do that.. but was tired and frustrated when trying to delete a home directory that started in .username so of course rm -rf .* and it hit . and .. (oops)
salamontagne
Experienced Member
Ahh, WD-40...the wonder stuff
Ive used it to clean old disk drives and such (espically if the drive is RUSTED, lol) Works so-so, but then you get the prolbem of it gets dirty REALLY quick....
As far as haveing Chipset fans die, I've had a system or two come to me and the person said "It was makeing noise, then it stopped and i thought it fixed itself"
Sure enough, i power on the board, chipset fan not moveing....I stop right there, even before i try and re-seat the memory or anything
"Go buy another board"
"Why? This one is is xxxbrandxxx, its the best in the world, it shouldn't be broken"
At which point i just point (pun intended) to the fan on the CS "Get one that dosent have that"
"OHH"
Lulz and tears....
Ive used it to clean old disk drives and such (espically if the drive is RUSTED, lol) Works so-so, but then you get the prolbem of it gets dirty REALLY quick....
As far as haveing Chipset fans die, I've had a system or two come to me and the person said "It was makeing noise, then it stopped and i thought it fixed itself"
Sure enough, i power on the board, chipset fan not moveing....I stop right there, even before i try and re-seat the memory or anything
"Go buy another board"
"Why? This one is is xxxbrandxxx, its the best in the world, it shouldn't be broken"
At which point i just point (pun intended) to the fan on the CS "Get one that dosent have that"
"OHH"
Lulz and tears....
Ahh, WD-40...the wonder stuff
Ive used it to clean old disk drives and such (espically if the drive is RUSTED, lol) Works so-so, but then you get the prolbem of it gets dirty REALLY quick....
As far as haveing Chipset fans die, I've had a system or two come to me and the person said "It was makeing noise, then it stopped and i thought it fixed itself"
Sure enough, i power on the board, chipset fan not moveing....I stop right there, even before i try and re-seat the memory or anything
"Go buy another board"
"Why? This one is is xxxbrandxxx, its the best in the world, it shouldn't be broken"
At which point i just point (pun intended) to the fan on the CS "Get one that dosent have that"
"OHH"
Lulz and tears....
In each of my own cases of dead HS fans, I had felt the HS w/stopped fan to determine if it really needed a fan. At least in my experience (again, knock on wood), I haven't had any get more than a bit less than comfortable. I had only been using AMD based systems on my desktops though, with VIA, nVidia or AMD chipsets. Never used an Intel based board new enough to need a chipset HS.
Video card fans are a big culprit as well. I've only had one video card fan die on me, and it was a Radeon 8500. I disconnected that fan as well, after trying to 3in1 it every few weeks for a few months. Since I am not a big gamer, and spend most of my time in Mozilla/Firefox, it survived a few more years until I upgraded. I would hope that these ICs have some smarts and can throttle themselves during thermal "events" like modern CPUs can/do.
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Trevor
NeXT
Veteran Member
I installed a differential HVD SCSI drive into a single-ended LVD scsi bus.
Nuked the drive, controller and another drive that was on the bus.
Nuked the drive, controller and another drive that was on the bus.
Tetrium
Experienced Member
At one time I was upgrading a processor and this mainboard had jumpers for the voltage setting. I know the new processor was OK so I was surprised the screen stayed black.
Then I found out that instead of setting the jumpers on the 1-2 or 2-3 positions I had set them on either 2-3 or removed!
After I had set the jumpers correctly it booted normally...but the keyboard didn't work anymore! After having tried 3 different keyboards (trying each after a cold reboot) I came to the conclusion that somehow the keyboard controller part of the mainboard was fried.
I put in a USB keyboard and it worked! But...not in the BIOS so I had no way of setting the boot priority...so couldn't install windows on it.
I was out of ideas and did what I normally do when in a situation like this...I set the project aside untill I think of another thing I could try to either get it working again or finding out for sure it's kaput.
Sure enough, about half a year later when reading something unrelated I read someone had the same problem and fixed it by plugging a PS/2 keyboard in a PS/2 --> USB converter and this way the keyboard worked also in the BIOS. I had found the path!!
Next thing I quickly unpacked that mainboard and set up a testbench.
I got a regular keyboard, put it into one of those USB comverters and plugged it into an USB port.
And then I flipped the switch (or more accurately, I used a philips screwdriver and shorted the power switch header).
Alas, that wasn't the only thing that got shorted. Right after it powered on, I saw a small plume of smoke coming from near the BIOS chip and smelled...that smell.
After unpowering the thing and looking more closely...I had set the BIOS battery jumper to clear CMOS.
That second attack proved to be fatal, the board was dead. Atleast the backplate was still of use for a friends mainboard that didn't have one hehe
Nasty little things, those jumpers are
Edit:Something that happened at work about 2 years ago.
Back then I worked in a small computer shop thingy, we repaired and gave refurbished 'obsolete' computers to 'slightly-handicapped' people. One of them told us he knew a lot about computers...I hear that a lot and I can tell when someone doesn't know as much about computers as they try to let you think
This person was one such person. ANyway, he got the computer but after a week or 2 he told us it didn't work anymore. He brought the computer back so we could have a look at it.
It turned out he had tried to upgrade the memory by plugging a bar of memory into an ISA slot!! 8O
The same workplace. One of my collegues unfortunately also belongs in that group of computer(system) builders who should realy instead become a bike repair man
He was working on a clients computer, it stood upright on our testbench with the sidepanel removed. The computer had just gotten a fresh windows on it and we were at the desktop doing something when all of a sudden he sais "Oh, theres a bar of memory only halfway in the memory slot!" and right away clicked it fully in it's slot while the computer was running!!. Instant black screen, and a dead motherboard and RAM -_-
Oh, and that same person also claimes to have overclocked a pentium 2 233 (the first hot-running) klamath to 600mhz...lol suuuure!!
Edit2:Oh, and I've gotten shocked by electricity 4 times now. Luckilly that has left no ill effect on me.....atleast thats what I keep telling myself
Then I found out that instead of setting the jumpers on the 1-2 or 2-3 positions I had set them on either 2-3 or removed!
After I had set the jumpers correctly it booted normally...but the keyboard didn't work anymore! After having tried 3 different keyboards (trying each after a cold reboot) I came to the conclusion that somehow the keyboard controller part of the mainboard was fried.
I put in a USB keyboard and it worked! But...not in the BIOS so I had no way of setting the boot priority...so couldn't install windows on it.
I was out of ideas and did what I normally do when in a situation like this...I set the project aside untill I think of another thing I could try to either get it working again or finding out for sure it's kaput.
Sure enough, about half a year later when reading something unrelated I read someone had the same problem and fixed it by plugging a PS/2 keyboard in a PS/2 --> USB converter and this way the keyboard worked also in the BIOS. I had found the path!!
Next thing I quickly unpacked that mainboard and set up a testbench.
I got a regular keyboard, put it into one of those USB comverters and plugged it into an USB port.
And then I flipped the switch (or more accurately, I used a philips screwdriver and shorted the power switch header).
Alas, that wasn't the only thing that got shorted. Right after it powered on, I saw a small plume of smoke coming from near the BIOS chip and smelled...that smell.
After unpowering the thing and looking more closely...I had set the BIOS battery jumper to clear CMOS.
That second attack proved to be fatal, the board was dead. Atleast the backplate was still of use for a friends mainboard that didn't have one hehe
Nasty little things, those jumpers are
Edit:Something that happened at work about 2 years ago.
Back then I worked in a small computer shop thingy, we repaired and gave refurbished 'obsolete' computers to 'slightly-handicapped' people. One of them told us he knew a lot about computers...I hear that a lot and I can tell when someone doesn't know as much about computers as they try to let you think
This person was one such person. ANyway, he got the computer but after a week or 2 he told us it didn't work anymore. He brought the computer back so we could have a look at it.
It turned out he had tried to upgrade the memory by plugging a bar of memory into an ISA slot!! 8O
The same workplace. One of my collegues unfortunately also belongs in that group of computer(system) builders who should realy instead become a bike repair man
He was working on a clients computer, it stood upright on our testbench with the sidepanel removed. The computer had just gotten a fresh windows on it and we were at the desktop doing something when all of a sudden he sais "Oh, theres a bar of memory only halfway in the memory slot!" and right away clicked it fully in it's slot while the computer was running!!. Instant black screen, and a dead motherboard and RAM -_-
Oh, and that same person also claimes to have overclocked a pentium 2 233 (the first hot-running) klamath to 600mhz...lol suuuure!!
Edit2:Oh, and I've gotten shocked by electricity 4 times now. Luckilly that has left no ill effect on me.....atleast thats what I keep telling myself
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dkedrowitsch
Experienced Member
Back in the day I was over at a friends house helping him figure out what was wrong with his 386. He apparently tried shuffling some ISA boards around for some reason and he couldn't get the machine to boot afterward. While the PC was sitting at the BIOS's config summary screen waiting for a boot disk, and he proceeds to show me what boards he moved by yanking them out and shoving them back in WHILE THE MACHINE WAS ON. I even saw a small spark! I asked him why he didn't shut it off first and he responded "eh, it usually just shuts itself off when I pull a board out".
Believe it or not, the problem ended up being a corrupt partition on his hard drive no-doubt caused by erroneous data being written to the drive as the motherboard freaked out from hot-swapping parts. A quick fdisk/format/restore and he was back in business.
Thank goodness for well designed power supplies that protect from shorts so quickly!
Believe it or not, the problem ended up being a corrupt partition on his hard drive no-doubt caused by erroneous data being written to the drive as the motherboard freaked out from hot-swapping parts. A quick fdisk/format/restore and he was back in business.
Thank goodness for well designed power supplies that protect from shorts so quickly!
You must be right, I have to admit I've tried to erase it from memory...
It was this board:
(MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum), and it was the thing under the fan.
I have that board (I think, it a K8N Neo something) in my home desktop PC. That same fan went out on mine, i replaced it once but then that one failed so I removed the fan from the heatsink and it works fine.
(aside from the floppy controller part that does not work anymore after I messed around with a drive cable while it was running) :headslap:
digger
Experienced Member
Aren't those connectors supposed to be idiot-proof these days? I.E.: if it shouldn't connect, it's deliberately made not to fit? Missing pin, edge connector, etc?
Hmm, I dropped a screw onto a running PC, luckily it did not short anything, but in my infinite wisdom rather than pulling the plug I tried to fish it out very carefully while the power was still on, as I lifted it I saw a small arc and the machine died. The board was fried.
Probably the stupidest thing I have ever done was with a dead Athlon, I was just playing with it and I thought how hot could it possibly get just after power up. So I turned the machine on and immediately (I'm talking less than 5 seconds) put my thumb on the exposed core. Yeah, I had Athlon XP 1800+ burned into the top of my thumb for about a week.
Probably the stupidest thing I have ever done was with a dead Athlon, I was just playing with it and I thought how hot could it possibly get just after power up. So I turned the machine on and immediately (I'm talking less than 5 seconds) put my thumb on the exposed core. Yeah, I had Athlon XP 1800+ burned into the top of my thumb for about a week.