The worst thing I ever did to hardware without destroying it

I would say I have three winners in this category

#1: This happened to my own machine. I am usually not this willing to try "risky" stuff with other peoples hardware. I was trying a 300A celeron at 450, and running some benchmarks on it. I wanted to get a really accurate CPU temperature reading, so I had taped my thermal probe to the back of the Celeron retaining clip. This was pretty good, but not good enough for me https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif. I wanted a reading on the front side of the CPU -- say right at the base of the metal covering on the CPU, in between the heatsink and the pin section of the processor. I slipped the probe into this area, and to my horror, saw some [small] sparks, followed by an immediate system reboot. In my attempt to find the most accurate temperature reading, I had shorted two (or more) of the pins on the face of my CPU. I got lucky. The processor was undamaged, and runs rock solid at 450 Mhz to this day.

#2 Once again, on one of my own machines, I had an intel AL440LX motherboard, but it came from a Micron PC, so it had a Micron bios number. I couldn't use the Intel flashes in it, and Micron wasn't staying current, so My Celeron 433 would only post at 400. (no big deal, it still ran at 433) I decided to try using an intel flash on the board. The flash utility wouldn't do a flash because the header in the flash file was different than the one in my bios. I used a hex editor (i am not much of a programmer, so this was a big thing for me. i can, however, understand hex numbers) and changed all the bios files to match my header. Flashed the bios, and Viola . . . post at 433.

#3:
this has probably happened to many other people while working on a machine. I was trying to get a PCI sound card to work. Had the lid off the machine, the card in, but no screw. When I plugged in the speakers, I wound up unplugging the card so about 1/2 of the pins were disconnected. I shut the power off immediately (windows was shut down improperly . . . hehe) plugged the card back in, and it still worked. Nothing like a hot pluggable sound card https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif

anyone ever try someting bigger? a CPU? My Dad once did a video card without ruining it. How about RAM?

I've had a few interesting times with hardware, but one that really stands out.

I was replacing ram in some IBM PC300's(if I recall correctly). About 16 machines I had to do, they were in place in a computer lab.
So here I am running around powering down machines, pulling the case top, and replacing memory, when to my horror I notice that I had powered up a machine instead of powering it down. This is of course after I had taken out the ram and put in the new stuff.

Good thing is nothing happened, except for maybe me losing some more hair off the top.

[This message has been edited by DelphTech (edited August 03, 1999).]

Here is a pretty good one: building a system for a customer, had the hard drive hooked up (but not mounted) and the system running in Win98. I decided to mount the hard drive in one of the 3.5" drive bays - slid the drive in a little too far and... POP!! Big sparks, and the system immediately turns off. Apparently the hard drive touched the internal connectors on the case's power switch and grounded out the system. Big black marks on hard drive, beads of sweat on forehead...

Fortunately, everthing still worked, so I guess I just got lucky. https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif

Steve

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Altoplanos Information Systems, Inc.
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho USA
www.altoplanos.net

Hey, rusabus

in your #3, you said something about a hot-swappable sound card? well, ive been tinkering around with an older pc at home, (133, intel mobo, pnp...) and win98. I have found that ISA PnP cards (most) ARE hot swappable. i have hot swapped 3com NICs (509b), USR sporster modems, almost any soundcard (of course PnP), and even a SCSI PnP card. the SCSI card needed a reboot though =). however, with an, for example, ESS1869 sound chipset i can remove it and re-insert it as many times as i like.

To install a card hot, you get into windows, stick it in, hit refresh in device manager, and viola! new hardware found. if you have any comments please email me [email protected]

I've done a few hot swaps of BIOS chips. Burnt a couple with the wrong flashes (like the Micron story above), and had no access to floppy for reflashing. Boot the computer with good BIOS chip, swap it out for the bad, flash the BIOS. It's worked for me about 9 out of 10 times.

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Who needs a life, I have Internet!
www.nineworlds.net

Kinda in this thread:

Back about 1994 I was still pretty green. I was working on an architect's secretaries computer. DOS with WPerfect. No Windows.
Her system was working screwy so I was trying to diagnose. .. figured maybe it was a virus. Booted up with a Mcafee boot disk. Found the Stoned Virus, a Master Boot Sector Virus. Mcafee asked if I wanted to remove the virus. Sure, of course. Restart the computer and everything is gone. No backups nothing, several years of contracts and specs. Vanished. I spent the next 2 days and nights doing a sector by sector recovery and managed to get 25% of the files back (at most.)
Even Norton couldn't fix the MBR.

I did learn though, if any of my clients virus scanners ever find a MBR virus, they are instructed NOT to remove it until I can get there and back every thing up.

It is funny though. When our clients screw up, they still have hope we can fix it so the outlook doesn't seem so bleak to them.

We know when we screw up and when it is bad and when there is no hope https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif

DE

100% perfect since then though https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif

This just happened recently, to one of my machines...

Working on the machine on a hot day, in a room with no AC, disaster struck. Somehow, through some odd quirk of fate, a drop of sweat from my face fell on exactly the right spot to fry my PCI bus. I didn't see where it landed, I only saw my display blank out.

A moment of silence, please.

But hey, it paved the way for my new DFI board and Celeron 400, so I'm not going to complain too loudly...


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[This message has been edited by Getzburg (edited August 04, 1999).]

i wasnt so lucky.my own computer.wanted to get away from the need to remove case top to use drive copy as i have removable drives.
this needed some drilling to enable the use of the top bay as machine is now nearly full.
very careful to remove all the swarf and
anyway it all worked.going well i decided
to do one last job and fit an extended usb
card.it wasnt a good fit on back bracket and
the bracket sprung away from card.i soldered
it back and re-fitted.w98 put the drivers in
(twice)I TOOK THIS AS QUIRK OF 98.it worked
and proudly sat in device manager.put case
top on its been a good day. pushed computer
back into its home and re-started.WINDOWS
PROTECTION ERROR-----bloody card had just
sprung itself enough to kill it-----i guess
it was trying to move when drivers went in.
ah well at least it was only a £40 card.
better get a hub.

I have a computer in the repair shop of our store that is our "guinea pig" so to speak. It is only a P5/120 which is fine because we mostly use it for just hooking printers to when we test them, and getting online to download drivers. I have knocked out virtually every card in it (video, nic, modem) since none have any screws, while it was running, and pushed them back in and everything worked. I accidentally removed one of the 72 pin RAM chips once thinking it was off, when actually it was in Windows and the screen went blank and it left out the funkiest beep code I have ever heard. For kicks, I yanked the CPU while in Windows, screen went blank and that was it. I put the CPU back in while still running, but it just stayed blank....I powered off and on again...worked wonderful. We often joke in out repair shop about this system, only though it is only a P5/120, we won't trade it for the world, because it is a tough little cpu....it takes all our abuse and keeps right on ticking!!!!

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[email protected]

Check these:

1. Hot PnP'd a sound card sometime ago in an old 486's slot, while booting. Win95 boot on a 486 is the most boring thing, so I couldn't wait to turn it off and then back on, and plugged it. When it started, Windows found the new hardware and asked for a driver!

2. Too busy, too tired and too sleepy a morning, had placed my coffee in front of my briefcase. I tried to reach it with my left hand (right-handed), cause my right one was trying to pickup the phone, which was ringing. The briefcase fell onto my coffee and the coffee was spilled into a working machine and the multi-power supply (220VAC!!!). When I saw what I had done, I pulled the 220V cable and saw the multi-power supply covered with coffee! My right hand was about 2'' from the spilled coffee!!! Thank God I'm still alive!
The machine was okay, after a good dry-up.

3. I was kidding with one of the techs someday. I picked up a screw and told him:
"What if I threw this into your machine's power supply? (the machine was on)" and threw it. The damn thing went into the working power supply, turned a few rounds, by the fan, and came out again. I couldn't believe my eyes! I was 3m from the machine.
It also continued working!

4. Lots of cable bindings while the machines are on.
Tons of a variety of liquids onto keyboards.

5. When I was new to business, I connected a SCSI scanner on the LPT1 and the printer on the SCSI card, on a customer's machine. When I realised what I had done, I started pulling my hair off. After a minute, when I tried them on the correct ports, both where okay.
Thank God, cause I'd be bald now!



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When a good one meets some of the best...
I've died and gone to heaven!

Hummm let me see!!
How about placing a Cpu chip backwards
on the socket!!! or putting the power cable red to red instead of black to black , I Did that the frist time I build a system 5 years ago, Belive me I have flash backs everytime I build a computer.

This wasn't one that I did myself, but I think it deserves an honorable mention. A customer bought a brand new pipeline burst cache motherboard, a speedy P133, and a Case. Says, "My son and I are going to put together a computer." He brought the parts back in the next day, saying it wouldn't work. Once we put it on the bench, we saw that they had bolted the motherboard to the case with *NO* standoffs! The screws went through the motherboard directly into the case. Needless to say, there were some healthy black marks on the case.
I've had my share of card hotswaps, even a memory hotswap. Once I had a computer that had intermittent video, so i would remove the video card, reposition it, and restart the computer. After about a dozen restarts, I realized the power swith was not working etheir, and was stuck in the on position.
Probably the funniest of all. Was working on a customers computer and he was right there asking all kinds of questions. The comp started up and gave me a CD Rom drive not detected error (panasonic 2x on sb16 on a dos/win3.1 system). I look down and realize I forgot to plug the data cable into the sound card. Look up at the customer, make eye contact, plug in the data cable with the system still on. Hit retry and the driver picked up the cdrom and everything was dandy!

The CD-ROM could have been disasterous -- but i bet he was impressed.

1st incident. Was helping a tech from the opposite side of his bench, couldn't see the monitor. 486, with a 28.8 modem that wouldn't work. The modem was out and i thought the device was off, popped the modem into the ISA slot. A large POP, a small plume of smoke, and a 3 or 4 inch flame from the modem card. Was very nervous for a few minutes till the device started after pulling the 'hot-swapped' modem. cost me $40, but it is funny to me now.
2nd incident, my own personal device. Was surfing, somehow hit eject on my CD-Rom. the drawer popped out, knocking my large Margarita on the rocks over, spilling a large percentage of it into the mechanism. the system rebooted spontaniously. i hit the power button, and a quickly as i could, opened the case, yanked the CD-Rom, fortunately there was none on the MB. I opened the cover on the Turtle Beach drive, ran water over the circuit board, dried it off, and let it sit for a day. Reinstalled it, when i thought it was dry--nothing. I was mildly depressed, but didn't yank the drive. Two days later, i was on my device, and opened the CD drawer, put a disk in, and Viola! it worked, and i was amazed!! I would only try this with Tequila, though!!

I had a bad experience when initially trying to overclock my Celeron 300a to 450 on my BH6 board. Running it at 300 mhz was fine, had temps around the 30 degree celsius mark, upped it to 450, and had to bump up the voltage also to 2.2, no worries, was running sweet. Left it running some Demo's of Quake 2 and Unreal (as you do) but didnt have any program to monitor temps in Windows. Anyways, left it go for a while, and notice the case was getting pretty warm. Checked BIOS for temperatures and it said 50 degrees celsius. Hmm, that couldnt be right 50 degrees is damn hot. So I let it go, and went back to more testing. Overall I think I let the PC go for about 8 hours straight running benchmarks and tests etc, at about 50 degrees. Without any lock ups however, which is why I thought the thermal monitor must be wrong, surely at that temp for the mobo, the machine would lock up or show some sign of overheating. Now here comes the annoying part. I did all these tests after a fresh install of Win95 so I still needed to install drivers for modem etc. Put in floppy disk for modem, read error. Put in Printer disks, read error also. Hmm, every disk I put in the drive gave me a read error, and in turn, screwed the disk up completely. And none of them would work anymore. I screwed up pretty much all of my driver disks. Then I decided to re-install Windows again. Win95 boot disk got screwed up also on boot, and even the backup copy of it I keep died. Back to the good ol reliable DOS 6 disks to kick start my PC, which thankfully worked without dieing. Then I had to go onto the net using standard 28.8 modem drivers to download all the drivers for peripherals etc. I know store all my drivers on the one CD due to this time wasting exercise. My PC withstood the 50+ degrees except the Floppy drive. The cheapest part of them all, thankfully. Swiped another floppy from work and all works fine. Well after I added about 3 more fans to the PC everything works fine, at about 30 degrees.

A few years ago - I came with my wife over to her one of her friends (my first mistake) house. Nan said that I worked on computers for a living and I said yeah its what I do.
So the friend of my wife said that her husband just bought a computer. I said great and now you can get e-mail from nancy (my second mistake). My wife's friend said can you show me how to do it that? (my third mistake). So I did. We went to their computer and I said do you have a modem? (I didn't see one). *Oh I forgot I was holding a can of Diet Coke by this time.* So my wife's friend said the store guy told her it has everthing in it. I said ok, it must be inside (I swear I did not see a modemjack). Before anything else gone on - she said can you open it up and see - and I said sure (another mistake). I asked for a screw driver (why? I don't know) - unscrewed the cover and looked inside and saw no modem. standing by the door I picked upped my coke the door swung open wider (which I was standing behind) (YES another mistake) in comes her husband - the can drops (coke in the computer) I cry. The Wife crys. The husband is mad but crys. And my wife tells me you know - you should be more careful when looking at someones computer. I looked at my wife's friend and said got a straw?
The morale here? If your wife says that she needs to drop by her friends house for a minute tell her to drop you first somewhere ELSE!

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Techs do it with hard drive

I've done ram before on an Acer Aspire. while machine was up and running i popped another 16 megs of ram, the system rebooted and worked just fine

I've hot swapped a few ISA cards(usually accidentally)- once my boss was standing right beside me and I pulled ram out of a running machine - he didn't even notice. But this one takes the cake.

Installing scsi card for HP scanner in my girlfriends machine (Gateway 133 that her DAD paid $1900 for.) It was right after we moved to the college town we live in now. OK - machine lying on side (power off) - card in one hand - just opened BEER sitting on keyboard tray directly above machine - can you see where this is going? Yep, I close the keyboard tray and my brand new Bud Lite toppled strait into her Gateway. It got on everthing. Girlfriend FREAKS - I FREAK (sort of)...

Let machine dry out, pull all cards exept video. It boots - put cards back in one by one rebooting each time. Worked like a champ.
https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2000/09/1.gif

I have repaired computers for nearly 5 years now and have had my share of close calls. I thinks I about messed up my pants when working on a brand new AMDK/2 400 for a customer.
After I finished doublechecking all of my connections I decided to fire it up. Every thing worked fine, except occasional error messages when windows started, and lockups.
I searched for a soultion to the problem and tried every diagnostic step possible. Even a clean install with no periphials or cards. At the end of my rope I tried a new processor.
nothing worked . Untill I looked down to see the CORE Voltage was set at 3.3v.
Fortunatley both CPUs. Were ok.


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[email protected]

The worst thing I've ever done? I have to admit that I havn't done anything TERRIBLY horrible, but a while ago at a store I worked at we recieved a computer that would only display funky ascii charactors in various patterns and colors on the screen at boot. After a bit of research we found that one of the SIMMs was put in backwards! We took it out and put it in right and it worked fine. Suprisingly, I think it was an Acer.

One of our best customers had ordered a new machine for his own home use. He ordered the works! DVD, cd burner, Voodoo 3500, 128mg ram, Awe 64, AMD K-6 2\400, etc. I did a meticulous job on the build and I left the case side open so the new owner could check it out. He came to pick up the system while I was running a final stress test on it. I slipped into the office to grab his bill and when I returned to the shop the machine was throwing sparks and smoking. The dude had be examining the interior of the case with a small, metal mag-lite. While looking around he had inadvertently touched the cpu fan with his fingers and jumped dropping the light onto the motherboard. He then poured my Diet Mountain Dew on the board to extinguish the sparks. I pulled the AC plug right away but the damage was done. What the board short didn't fry, my Dew did. We were able to salvage the drives and the case but nothing else. Good thing I wasn't drinking lighter fluid......hehe.

Wildtech I hope the next machine cost him
double, you must have freaked

I didn't do it, but a friend whos poor souped up 486\66 much loved pc I had fixed up a couple times brings me her pc "cause it won't boot up, it got kicked" she was almost crying.
The side of the mini tower was kicked so far in I could hardly get it off (her husband got drunk and kicked it, also broke his stupid wrist punching monitor (haha)...she who would never leave him no matter how bad he treated her, and it was bad, booted him for good finally...for messing with her pc, last straw..no AOL). Anyhow motherbd was almost a U, and cards all bent and distorted...took them all out without much hope, knowing she has no money either, put books on them overnight to flatten them back out, then put them in a new (old) case. I couldn't believe every single thing still worked, I had to fdisk and reformat, etc cuz partitions all gone, but hey...still going now 6 mos later...so...




[This message has been edited by JeanneD (edited October 01, 1999).]

I had just finished an upgrade and was booting the machine. Video was not initialising so I pushed on the card to make sure it was seated just as my buddy tapped my shouler shocking me. The system rebooted. I panicked. It reset the bios but no permanent damage done...

Being that I'm new to the field, I've had my share of goof ups. One night, not thinking, I did something that almost everyone knows they shouldn't do. I plugged the keyboard into my machine while it was running. A faint smell of something burning, shut the machine down, open it up, and yup. I had fried a circuit on the MB. A small wire, a little solder, and.....it's still in use today.

Another time, I was installing two hard drives into their bays after moving all the compontents into a larger case. Thinking that I had the drive cage hooked onto the case, I let go, and started to put in the first screw. To my horror, the whole cage, with hard drives fell to the bottom of the case. Mumbled a few choice words, said a quick prayer, repositioned the case, attached the screws, hooked everything up, and....I'm using those hard drives still.

Live and Learn eh?

[This message has been edited by Dav (edited December 04, 1999).]

To day I was finishing up a brand new system for a client. This was the 12th machine I had built today and was getting tired. This one was special thought. PIII500 DVD CR-RW the works. I was careful, and neat zip ties on all of the cables, Extra screws in the drives, everything was perfect. Os loaded fine.
Two hours after I delivered the machine cutomer called and complained about some weird beeping. Ane the machine randomly shut itself off.

come to find out I managed to plug the CPU fan in backwards.
CPU temp was 215F at its peak
Glad it still works.

Gizmo, how'd u plug a P3 in BACKWARDS??

Here's my goof. Being the strange perosn I am i'm work on my dual celeron setup and though I'd turn it off, instead I'd only suspended it (Stupid ATX formfactor). and I removed both CPU's. When i realized what i'd done I turned off the machine inserted both CPU's and Windows runs w/o a hickup

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"We don't know one millionth of one percent aboout anything" - Thomas Edison

my mistake read the post wrong the FAN was in backwords. good thing not the CPU