Your strange hardware moments

[Ketxxx]

Not sure if this should be in general nonsense or here.. but seen as its hardware seems to fit here more. In a nutshell, whats been your strange hardware moments and what fixed it? The idea in this thread is to have all sorts of hardware oddities covered. For example;

Yesterday I took one of my XP8000 modules out, and when I stuck it back in the system wouldnt boot. Moving the other stick to the DIMM slot the other module was in showed no problems, booted right up so I knew it wasn't the DIMM slot that had died. In the end it just turned out one of my sticks isnt as dust resistent as the other, and blowing the DIMM slots clean of dust with a watchmakers blower fixed it.

 

[Grings]

plugging an spdif header into a kt333 (any relation?) motherboards I-R connector (i was stoned) and watching traces on the board catch fire, it was like the fuse wire on mission impossible
the motherboard still works now

 

[TUngsten]

When I built my latest system, I used an old Coolermaster case that I found locally, an awesome looking case. After lovingly cleaning and restoring the case (it needed some cosmetic work), carefully installing and getting the system ready, I pressed the power button...and...


nothing happened

After taking everything out, reconnecting the components, sweating with the feat that my mobo was fried, cpu was DOA and a score of other things, I tried one last option: replace the case Power button. Voila! The button was busted. Next day I had the blue-LED button you see in the pic, and all is well

 

[pt]

frying 3 hdd's in month
solution - get a new one

 

[Sasqui]

Plugging the PSU motherboard connector in backwards (yes, it isn't supposed to fit, but I did it). Trying to turn it on, nothing happened. Freaked when I realized it - plugged back in correctly and everythign was fine.

Ok strange maybe not... stupid? Probably

 

[Mediocre]

Getting home, hitting my PC's power button (LC'd, but NB @ 1.75V)....

got attacked by the wife

When I got back to my PC (30-45minutes later...yes I'm teh man), it had not even POSTED. It was hanging at a black screen.

System wouldn't power up, I got fans and LC pump, but no POST.

Bought a P5K (vanilla), hooked everything up, and it booted. When to setup my RAID and discovered I had to RAID with two specific SATA headers (e-sata on back, and a black header new pci-e slot). Well, after re-configuring the SATA plugs, I tried to power it up. NOTHING...

As I was taking things out to check, I found I RIPPED A CAP OFF OF MY GFX CARD!!! It was 11pm, so I hit radio shack in the morning and CHARGED a $1.25 cap and soldered it on. All is well now (except I can only RAID 2 drives )

Two horror stories in a week

 

[regan1985]

when my usb hard drive only gets picked up by a pc it hasnt been on before or a new install of windows,its like its a slut or something.just like to get arround

 

[kwchang007]

Plugged in a molex (for a hdd) while the comp was running . Created a nice spark, psu died (surprised it didn't take anything with it) and replaced the psu. The broken psu is sitting in my house and has a broken fuse, but I have no clue where to buy a ceramic fuse, any ideas?

 

[Hawk1]

Well, I had my current rig custom built from a local shop. I didn't like the cable management they did, so about a month later I got up the nerve to take everything out and redo it to my liking (keep in mind I never even opened a PC before this, as my last one was a PII from '98).

So after reconnecting everything, rebooted and got into Windows no problem. I was like "great, that wasn't so hard", until I tried to play BF2142, it did not recognize the CD. Checked my drives and it did not list my CD drive. Checked it in the BIOS and it wasn't even there. I thought WTF, tried reconnecting the IDE cable, setting the jumper, still nothing. So, I humbly took it back to the place I bought it, (after undoing all my cable management work since I didn't want them to think I F***** anything up), as I thought it was just a bad DVD drive.

Guy at the place wanted me to leave it at the shop, but he had a spare few minutes and looked at it. Took him 5 minutes to open it up and relize the IDE connector on the MB was upsidown. Rebooted and recognized the drive immediately.

LOL I thought, ok just place the giant L on my head now, thanks.

 

[Mediocre]

Plugged in a molex (for a hdd) while the comp was running . Created a nice spark, psu died (surprised it didn't take anything with it) and replaced the psu. The broken psu is sitting in my house and has a broken fuse, but I have no clue where to buy a ceramic fuse, any ideas?

^^ LOL

I did that back in '98 with a PII 233, 'cept I tried to plug it in (while the PC was on) BACKWARDS..Needless to say it arced to the HDD.

Took out the PSU, HDD, and motherboard....lucky it was still under warranty

That was also my first PC build (sorta) as it was one of those - 'we'll ship you the parts you need, you do the work and ship the bad parts back to us'

Don't even think the company is still around...think it was called pro-gen or something...


As for replacing your fuse - Just solder a paper clip across it (just don't call me if it catches fire )

 

[pbmaster]

During an install of Windows, I touched a fin on my Zalman CPU cooler...SPARK!! I see a huge bolt of static electricity fly from my finger into the cooler!! The installation stops...I get scurred...restart, everything is fine. Try to power on the next morning...nothing!! Determined mobo was fried(no wonder). Now all is going fine.

 

[Beertintedgoggles]

My socket A MB had a sudden fit of restarting, about half a second of POST screen, then restarting again. Found out my CPU block was leaking and had antifreeze around the socket. A quick clean and new hose clamps and it was working again until the ATX power connector fused itself to the motherboard header. It was an A7N8X-E Deluxe so the CPU power came from the +5V line. I had my 2500+ xp-m at 2.7GHz. It was drawing so much juice that the two connectors melted together. I should have soldered wires from the +5 molex wires to the regulators. Hindsight is a bitch.

 

[Black Panther]

During an install of Windows, I touched a fin on my Zalman CPU cooler...SPARK!! I see a huge bolt of static electricity fly from my finger into the cooler!! The installation stops...I get scurred...restart, everything is fine. Try to power on the next morning...nothing!! Determined mobo was fried(no wonder). Now all is going fine.

Yikes that could really happen? I've been touching my zalman all over today to see if the fins or heatpipes are warm (and they're not...)

I've got a 2001 Pentium 4 which I swear takes its revenge on me every time I open it up. It just doesn't like being touched I guess.

Really weird stuff, to mention one for example I take off the side of the case to blow the dust out with compressed air. Put it back. Connect it. Power it up. Beeps. Remove RAM. Put them back in. Pc works.

The most recent one was that after 6 years I decided to tidy up the cables inside. While arranging them I disconnected the power, reset and leds. I put everything back and the pc beeped. I played around with the wires and finally the pc didn't beep. A couple of days later my daughter went to use it, and it stopped mid-POST. I pressed reset. Monitor went on standby and remained like that.

I thought it was those wires, since they had been the only thing I actually disconnected. I spent an hour trying different combinations, I even posted here for help since all I was getting were long beeps. Finally I put them exactly the way they were before the freezing mid-POST, and the pc worked, windows and all, no beeping. What's more is that I was told that erroneously switching the led wires (+ &-) shouldn't even have given me beeping but should only have caused the led lights not to work at all...

 

[psyko12]

When trying to pull out a molex from a cd rom drive, it was kinda hard and pulled it out with force hit my hand on the edge of the vcard and cut my self, luckily the vcard didn't break, although almost lost it's place on the mobo, it wasn't screwed and lock in lol