Newbies' victims...?

[korpse]

ever drop a Dell PowerEdge 6300 off the back of a truck? enough said...

[thirdfey]

First off, I dod not cause this, it just happened to happen to a computer I was working on. Anyone here heard of Applica? Turning one computer into 2 with a weird network/video card. Anyway, I put one in a system and power the system on, everything is initializing fine and booting up like it should so I walk away to check on another system I was working on. All of the sudden there is this loud CRACK!!!! sound, I turn and look, and a mini fireball shoots out out of the computer and onto the floor. I walk over, the fireball goes out(concrete floor) and in the computer theres a small flame about the size of a cigarette lighter flame coming out of the card where a capacitor was which is now a crispy on the floor, then the flame goes out. I have no idea what happened.

[ellingtond]

Years (and years) ago I had call about a computer acting eratic. It was an old DOS machine they ran DOS Wordperfect. The problem seemed virus related so I did a scan. Yep! Stoned boot sector virus. . . being the newbie I was I said "Sure, I want to delete the virus." BOOOOOOMMM!!!!! Boot sector, Partitions, everything. . .GONE. You know the rest of the story. . .years worth of architectural spec, client letters and billing toasted with no backup. I spent the next 2 days and nights doing sector by sector data recovery in a mad panic. Recovering snippets of text with no filenames etc. I still shudder when I think of it. There was no software to do that easier at the time. BTW, never "fix" a boot sector virus without backing up.

Now as far the worst I have been called on. . .
An electrician called me one time. He was hooking up an industrial sized UPS for a very well known radio station here. He wired up the box wrong and fried 16 computers, monitors, mice, keyboards, a couple of laser printers, a scanner and a coffee pot.
The worst part was this was a Wednesday and nobody in the company would get paid that week unless the data could be recovered and new stuff setup. Through the grace of God or something, a few drives survived (somehow) and the one where the most important stuff was transplanted and they were back in business.

Thankfully he wasn't working on the actual radio equipment. . . BTW he doesn't do that kind of work anymore He went back to pulling cables in new houses!

[Legion]

I seem to have the worest luck when it comes to computers. I can go months with no probs till one day everything goes wrong. My latest one was pretty bad. I was working in the Prez. office installing some software. I poped open the cd-rom and droped my lighter out of my top shirt pocket at the same time. So I bend down to grab it, as I come up smack! I head its the cd tray and breaks it clean off! Man was he pissed about that! Oh well life as a tech is so much fun!

[MrMatu]

On my second week on the job I dropped a envelope feeder for an HP4000. I was amazed at how many pieces there are to an envelope feeder. Fortunately the place was empty (except for my new boss) and after about 20 minutes and a few drops of crazy glue we were good to go.
I learned an important lesson about unplugging before you work on equipment. I was just tightening up a few screws in a new server, with the power off, and my screwdriver slipped and somehow shorted the right contacts and booted up the server. It didn't do any harm, but it scared me nonetheless. Make sure you oull out the plug before you take off the cover!

[vspazv]

my boss (owner of the small company) had just bought a new 50 gig 10k rpm seagate HD. i set the jumper, put the runners on it, slid it into the bay and hooked it up (simple right?) well, i hit the power button and... nothing. disconnected it and... still nothing (at this point im panicking) next thing i do is pull the HD out and this time it starts right up. after an hour of trying to figure out what is causing this (we tried the HD in another comp and it worked fine) i figured out one of the mounting brackets was hitting the motherboard and causing a short. after 2 minutes with a hacksaw it worked fine. (he didnt let me touch his computer for a month after that though)

[Tech666]

Not a tech any more , and this wasnt really my fault , but , i fried 3 fujitsu 13.6 gig hdds , after hooking up a case fan that had the 5 and 12v leads crossed. you know , red/black/black/yellow on one end , yellow/black/black/red... one of them was my own drive too...

[Shades]

I got one - I got a USB output for an old HX mobo. The plugs for the USB out were right next to the PS2 connectors on the mobo. Somehow I managed to short the pins, or get them reversed, and when I went to power it on... wooooh! the smell of burnt ceramic... ewww... whoops there goes a resistor!!! Ooops bye-bye to the power for the mouse, kb and USB!!

Of course, all I could see was a burnt resistor and all the bands burnt off - no circuit diag. for the mobo, so i was out with the soldering iron, and the hundreds and billions of resistors, trying to solder back a resistor to get this mobo going!

About 5 hrs later... finally i manage to get the 5V power back to the mice, kb and USB! what a job!

[Milkman]

When DIMMS first came to be I was installing one in a customers PC. It just so happened that the customer was standing right behind me. Well the system wouldn't P.O.S.T. and I started to freak, then ever-so-slowly smoke started to roll out of the machine, THE DIMM WAS COOKIN, I don't know what went wrong but the customer grabbed the machine and I never heard anyhing of it since.

[jksteger]

I was on a service call one day to replace the 250 watt power supply. I was going to just pull the wires from the toggle switch and replace the power supply and connect the power wires back to the old toggle switch. I followed the power cord behind a desk...where did it go? oh, now I see it it plugs into the wall right here, so I unplug the power cord from the wall, go to pull the wires off the toggle switch with a pair of needle nose pliers and BAM! loud sound, bright light. That is when I knew SOMETHING was wrong. I look under the desk and the system is plugged into a APC UPS 2500. I had unplugged the power from the UPS to the wall.
Thank God I usually only work with Servers now and I am NOT in the hardware dept.

JKSteger

[The Christian]

I have two distinct lessons i learned ( then again i bet we did a BUNCH of things other than what we stated on this board ).

First lesson, never to accidently take the power supply connector and connect it to the hard disk upside down. For the life of me i had no idea that the plastic was bent letting it fit into the hard disk. When i powered up the computer ( by the way it was MY hard disk ). I smelled a very distinct burning smell, it was quite lovely i tell ya. . Well after that, after 5 years of teching and engineering, plus programming, for some stupid odd reason ( the computer was on standby with the monitor turned off, i thought the computer was turned off. oops ) i stuck the modem in while the damn thing was turned on. I heard a large zap and quickly turned off the computer, luckily i let the comp sit to dissipate the electricity and the comp was fine with no problems, which i was very elated to find out.

Another thing i ALSO have to relate which was quite funny. I was over a friends house peering inside his computer over what i should upgrade. He told me he needed to upgrade the cpu which was a regular pentium. He proceeded to ( let me advice you his gratious announcement of how he was teching all his life and knew everything about computers ) take the cpu out while the computer was turned on. My eyes widened and i immedeatly turned off the computer, but for some reason he put the cpu back in and turned it back on. I saw streaks of electricity all over the motherboard and i saw the cpu melt. That is one experience i will never forget about, imagine my belly laugh.

[Larommi]

I have never wrecked customers hardware, yet. I have been doing this for a little over a year and a half. (Trust me, I am knocking on wood as you read this!!!)

But, we had a hard drive come in that was bad so I sent it back. When the replacement came, the darn thing just lept out of my hand and on to the floor. So, I sent it in again. Got another drive back. I was installing it in a customers computer, it was in one of those nice removable cages that the nicer cases have. Well, I set the cage down to grab a screw and the thing decided to roll off the counter. It was a good thing the hard drive was in there or I might have wrecked the floppy drive from the impact. It got sent back again and when the new one came I refused to touch it. Felt it was better that way.

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I might rock, but I am not made of stone!

[Green Iguana]

Being lazy and not wanting to pull my machine out from the wall to see what I was doing, I plugged my printer cable into the SCSI scanner card....good bye logic board.

[freetech]

sparked a hard drive. tried to move it its slot with the poer on. after that, when i plugged it in, it emitted a plume of smoke from the firmware chip!

[AlienDyne]

My turn now.

1. Flashed a BIOS with the wrong model.
The result? The system couldn't start. I RMA'd the mobo and it was replaced after some days(!)
2. Burned a Multi I/O card (remember those ancient I/O cards?) on a 486, when trying to make it work. Didn't realize that the power was on(!!)
3. Connected a faulty CPU fan together with the HDD. The result?
I witnessed 3 HDDs on fire!



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"Matter is passive. In spite of its power, it can't be controlled without the human mind." Sokrates

Photos Of My Work
www.geocities.com/alienhardware