Your strangest hardware malfunction

[Aquinus]

Oh, to add insult to injury, the issue came back with the new SATA cables, but only on one drive. I think one of my Hitachi drives is dying but the WD drive that was "dead" had a dying cable because I brought it to work with me, plugged it into one of our servers with an eSATA dock and SMART said that my 4 year old drive that has been running for 25000 hours is in fine shape . I think it might have been a double issue. Once the wife wakes up and I have access to the tower, I'm going to remove the drive from the raid and check the SMART logs. I'm just hoping that it isn't the RAID drivers (last updated when X79 came out. ) or the SATA controller itself.

You know, You would think that Intel's Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise would be able to check and run SMART tests on drives in your raid. My Phenom II 940 motherboard with an nVidia 750a SLI chipset was able to, and you could schedule it to run regularly too. Not to say it is bad, it's just a little lacking for a server-grade fakeraid RAID solution (C600 chipset.) I do say though, RSTE rebuilds RAID-5 almost twice as fast as nVidia's fakeraid which is a huge plus.

 

[syeef]

@ syeef
what happened afterwards? did they replace it or something/

Yes, they replaced it. I am still using the replaced one, for 4 years now and it still runs great! (though planning to get a Kepler within a month)

Oh, I forgot. The original 8800GT was running at 112C at idle and at load (playing NFS MW) it was running as high as 198C. It died at idle temp though.

 

[Grings]

I once exited a game i was playing as i had to order some new components for a build i was doing for a friend, including an optical drive and a few other bits for myself.

Once the order was placed i went to get straight back on my game, only to get an insert disk message - my optical drive had literally died within minutes of ordering a new one.

 

[Norton]

I did a build with a new mobo, CPU, ram, and SATA HDD (1st one I ever used). The build went fine and ran great but the startup time was terrible at almost 5 minutes. It drove me nuts trying to find the problem...... turned out to be a bum SATA cable, was a brand new cable , and I put the drive into the last SATA socket instead of the first :shadedshu

I now keep a stock of at least 4-5 new SATA cables in the parts bin for just in case

Board was a MSI 790GX Platinum (my 1st $100+ mobo) and CPU was a PII 720BE.. Both are still running great to this day.

 

[KainXS]

I had to downgrade from a E2160 back to like a celeron D because my cpu gave out, as soon as I hit the power button and got into windows power surge and no surge protector, everything got iced.

 

[newtekie1]

I've had issues with SATA cables and RAID before too. Back when I had my 680i board, the SATA ports on it were not notched to accept the latching style connectors, but the cables eVGA sent with the board had the latch. So when I had them in and the machine was running, they would actually wiggle out eventually and cause the drive to report failed. Took be a little while to figure out what was going on.

 

[Cotton_Cup]

I remember this just last week when I visited my friends house, saw him playing bf3 using 4gb ram and since he went to buy a 2x4gb ram, we went and test it, after testing each stick all seems good until we closed everything and put them all back at the table, the monitor won't post.

so we thought it was the gpu but it's not and the ram seems to be having problem so we used the old one and still not working, well in summary it was the ram(or motherboard we think at least) as we need to push it harder after the click when inserting ram until it showed the stuff on the monitor. I remember seeing my friends face was like...


WTFFFFFF until everything worked nicely.

 

[de.das.dude]

my system goes to 50% load whenever i install the VIA drivers on my mobo

 

[xBruce88x]

makes since if they're chipset drivers...

yea... SATA cables can be a PITA

 

[The Von Matrices]

Most unusual thing (I wasn't home at the time). My little brother put an ice cube on the 865P northbridge heatsink of one of my systems ten years ago because he thought it was too hot. Ice cube melted, and water covered the motherboard. System wouldn't boot after that.

I've had a stock, never overclocked Zotac 9800GT blow it's VRM and go up in smoke. I don't know why a completely stock card would do that. Also have had a hard drive do the same thing. Fortunately, warranty covered both of them.

The most annoying problem I've had is what I eventually found to be an OCZ DDR3 kit giving me memory errors and crashing the computer about once every week no matter the speed at which they were run. I tried changing the motherboard and power supply with no fix. And since the error occurred so infrequently, it would take weeks to find out if any fix I tried truly worked. I RMA'd it twice and OCZ couldn't reproduce the issues, so they returned it to me. I finally gave up and got rid of the kit about two years after I bought it.

 

[St.Alia-Of-The-Knife]

A bit unrelated, but i once built a 10inch 15w midget tesla coil in my house and screwed around with it. The same day, my internet was down for the whole evening and i even called my ISP. Turns out that when the coil is energized, the RF interference messes up the phone line, in fact, the phone would sometimes randomly ring when the coil is energized.

Interesting...

 

[xenocide]

I had an issue with a Sattelite "Reciever" that I had. I had just bought my new 32' TV, and was moving my room around, which meant moving the Reciever. I went to plug the Coaxial Cable in and right when it touched the connector it shot out a huge spark and the whole box started to smoke. I was so confused I just sat there for a few seconds. I tried plugging it back in and starting it up, worked fun straight until we switched to Comcast 18 months later.

I also had a weird problem with the Power\Reset connectors in the first computer I ever built. Either the cables were mislabeled or the motherboard was mislabeled, because they were switched. I discovered this after trying every combination of the power cable plugged in possible, and accidentally hitting the reset button (it was a crappy Raidmax case and the buttons were the same size and shape side by side).

 

[eidairaman1]

I had an issue with a Sattelite "Reciever" that I had. I had just bought my new 32' TV, and was moving my room around, which meant moving the Reciever. I went to plug the Coaxial Cable in and right when it touched the connector it shot out a huge spark and the whole box started to smoke. I was so confused I just sat there for a few seconds. I tried plugging it back in and starting it up, worked fun straight until we switched to Comcast 18 months later.

I also had a weird problem with the Power\Reset connectors in the first computer I ever built. Either the cables were mislabeled or the motherboard was mislabeled, because they were switched. I discovered this after trying every combination of the power cable plugged in possible, and accidentally hitting the reset button (it was a crappy Raidmax case and the buttons were the same size and shape side by side).

the Sattelite Reveiver Thing, the Antenna part of the dish itself is still collecting power signals i noticed thats why that happens, its happened to me before too, gotta be so careful with them