Worst hardware failure

[SavagePenguin]

What have been your worst cases of hardware failure?

A local business had a "cow" computer and purchased a new monitor for it. They called to have me install it, and fix a couple other things in their office.

When I plugged in the monitor and turned it on (even before I turned the computer on) it started smoking. The monitor filled the small room with smoke before it fizzled out.

That incident drew quite a crowd. I didn't know that there were that many people in the building.

[Sowulo]

Once upon a time....

I received a shipment of power supplies (long before ATX) which had non-standard wire colors for the four wires that connect to the on/off switch and no schematic on the box. Having an urgent build, I decided to make a 'best guess' that red & yellow are hot colors and green and blue would be ground. After blowing up the power supply (no damage to other components) and main circuit breakers to the entire building...thought better about trying any more guesses....

[theBeast]

This was a few moons ago...
A customer brought in an old 286 with a 10 Meg MiniScribe MFM hard drive (Heck, I would have hated to see the MaxiScribe!!) It was something simple, like it wasn't booting because the video card came unseated.
So, I popped it open and fixed 'er up good. The other tech said, "Why don't you run a CHKDSK on it?"
Sure, no prob. The customer was hanging over my shoulder as I typed in "CHKDSK".
<<SCREEEEEEEECHHHH>>
"Um...your hard drive just crashed..."

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***the Beast
- Fate drove me here...then told me to get out of the car...

[msn_tech]

A comuter I built for my daughter would no longer power up. I turned it on the the 12v fans turned but the 5v was gone. I started looking for obvious causes to the problem then remebered ther was a 2 years old in the house. I open up the 3.5 diskette drive to find the metal shield of a diskette jammed into the drive. I removed the shield, replaced the power supply and everything has been fine since. I have since moved all CPU's in the house above the reachable height of unsupervised 2 year olds.

[pcshark]

A client of ours had a Compaq Proliant 3000 sitting on a table. The table had wheels, and the server had wheels. Someone tried to move the table, lifted the corner, one of the wheels fell off the table. They set it down, the table tips, the server rolls off the table and onto the floor, ripping, yes I said ripping the VGA connector through the back of the system right off the motherboard. I didn't see it happen, but I saw the aftermath. I can only guess at the color of the guy's shorts directly afterward.

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

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[pcshark]

Oh HARDWARE failure! I thought it said Meatware failure. My bad (-;