HDD on FIRE!

[HookeyStreet]

Well, I work in a school and one of the PC's wouldnt power up. I noticed a slight burning smell and opened up the back to investigate. I could 'see' anything and continued to power the the PC up. Big mistake! The side mounted HDD started to spark and catch fire Lukily the flames went when I disconnected the unit from the mains

Ive been messing around with PC's for some time now, but Ive never seen anything like this!

 

[kyle2020]

oooh, pretty pyrotechnics!

Any post fire pictures?

 

[HookeyStreet]

oooh, pretty pyrotechnics!

Any post fire pictures?

Not atm, but I may get some. The PC is brand new so the company that supplies them will get a roasting from my manager. But I think I may get the make/model of the HDD in question and complain to the company that manufacture it because this incident could have been a lot worse

 

[qubit]

I've seen plenty of PSUs go up in smoke, sometimes with a loud bang, but never a hard drive. Which make and model was it?

 

[Deleted member 3]

I had a HD burn like 3 months ago. I swapped some wires from a fan to make it run slower and connected it to that by accident, woops.

 

[baison]

reminds me of my old gigabyte MB 8INXP, i smell something burning but just like you did i could'nt careless , the case was open i took a peak and continue do what i was doing , few secs and the MB was on fire "the fire was on the DPVRM fan sink that needed to be (pluged) like PCI cards but very small fan and just north of the CPU .

needless to say the MB did not boot right away and i was kind expecting that , what i did not is i try to power it few hours later and worked ... i can't believe i gave that MB to my brother after 5 years of abusing it , i should keep it just for the awsomeness of that MB

 

[HookeyStreet]

I've seen plenty of PSUs go up in smoke, sometimes with a loud bang, but never a hard drive. Which make and model was it?

Im going to find out after my lunch break lol

I had a HD burn like 3 months ago. I swapped some wires from a fan to make it run slower and connected it to that by accident, woops.

But this was out of nowhere. The PC had been off (but still connected to the mains) all weekend. I dont know if the initial problem occured this morning when it was powered up or over the weekend. TBH, if it happened over the weekend, the whole school could have gone up

 

[3volvedcombat]

Im sitting here wondering if my HDD's are going to catch on fire, well i listen to them often and no clicks, hums, stutters of any-sort. Also i have 2 high rpm 80mm fans that blow strait on them to make sure they dont get extremely warm.


Must have been a sight to see that, could have got some platter disklet that shatterd from the hard drive and be picking out pieces of hard drive platter from your boddy at the emergency clinic.

7200 RPM is REALLY fast if im not mistaken, and hardrives are load and crazy without the covers .

TBH, if it happened over the weekend, the whole school could have gone up

If the kids were reading this thread there probably trying to sabotage another computer ATM and the school is up ATM. LOL!!!!!!

 

[Black Haru]

I've heard rumors (totally unconfirmed) of viruses that would change the firmware on hard drives to up the RPM to the point of burning... I've always wanted to try it.

 

[HookeyStreet]

Steer clear of 160GB Samsung HD161GJ/EDU HDD's

 

[human_error]

Steer clear of 160GB Samsung HD161GJ/EDU HDD's

Now that's suprising, I always consider samsungs amongst the best hdds (i was expecting the hdd to be a maxtor or a toshiba tbh). Now i'm watchin' my spinpoint F1 like some sort of paranoid hard drive watcher ...

 

[YinYang.ERROR]

I have seen some kids somehow manage to get a ribbon cable to catch fire.

No idea how they did it, but it was pretty amusing.

 

[afw]

Now that's suprising, I always consider samsungs amongst the best hdds (i was expecting the hdd to be a maxtor or a toshiba tbh). Now i'm watchin' my spinpoint F1 like some sort of paranoid hard drive watcher ...

I think the new Samsung hard drives are good ... but the one i have in my second rig has some bad sectors ... bought it some 3 years ago ... the Hitachi 250GB that i bought with it still works great though ...

 

[HookeyStreet]

I have seen some kids somehow manage to get a ribbon cable to catch fire.

No idea how they did it, but it was pretty amusing.

LOL, if they can find a way to mess with the computer they will

 

[Frick]

Im sitting here wondering if my HDD's are going to catch on fire, well i listen to them often and no clicks, hums, stutters of any-sort. Also i have 2 high rpm 80mm fans that blow strait on them to make sure they dont get extremely warm.

I'm pretty sure if it gets to the point when a fire is actually started no fans will save you.

A way some people used to entertain themselves in high school was to set that little switch on the PSU to 110V before leaving the computer.

 

[pantherx12]

We used to mess with software instead as damaging the systems physically was just stupid as it would be us and the school loosing out on the hardware.

But we used to disable all the monitoring programs and anti viruses etc for the lulz.

That way for a few hours we could all browse what ever sites we liked XD

Eventually towards the end they made it hard enough for me to bypass things that it was not worth the effort lol

Still had access to the main servers for ages though, where I used to store massive amounts of data vs the 20mb I had of network storage on my user account

 

[Frick]

We used to mess with software instead as damaging the systems physically was just stupid as it would be us and the school loosing out on the hardware.

In our case it was almost good. They were Pentium 166Mhz machines with Win98. This was in 2003. :shadedshu

 

[afw]

In our case it was almost good. They were Pentium 166Mhz machines with Win98. This was in 2003. :shadedshu

...mercy killing ... lol ...

 

[freaksavior]

I had an HP DVD burner literally catch fire. Was burning a dvd one day, it sparked and caught fire, it spit and flung the dvd a good 5 feet. I laughed for a while. My brother was pissed he thought i broke it.

I called hp and told them it literally caught fire, she started laughing and told me to send it in when it was out of warranty

 

[ste2425]

in a school? that could have gone quite nasty