Boneheaded Tech Moments

[looniam]

i thought it wasn't a bad idea to quick check my q6600 installation w/o a heatsink; i had gotten some TIM on the socket pins and it would thermal trip, right?

it became a ~$250 paperweight.

 

[windwhirl]

Well, years ago, I was installing a Radeon 9250 AGP card. I was so excited, as it was going to be my jump from crappy onboard graphics (ProSavage integrated graphics, I think it was, by VIA or S3, I don't remember which one) to an actual relatively powerful discrete GPU.

In my excitement, I broke one of the chips. I had a free memory slot, and the plastic piece that holds the memory stick in place scraped the little chip out of the card, because I left it dangling and it was almost invading the AGP slot space. When I booted the system, the video signal was full of artifacts...

 

[trparky]

it became a ~$250 paperweight.

Or a box cutter.

 

[bug]

Boneheaded mistakes? Yeah, I got one. This was back in the days of FDISK, which as many of you know it's an old time utility used to partition disks. I think you may know where I'm going with this one. So anyways, I knew I needed to delete some partitions to repartition one of my drives but as you may have guessed, I accidentally chose the wrong disk and blew away my system drive. That was a fun evening. From that moment on FDISK become known to me as Fucked Disk.

fdisk is still alive and well: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fdisk
Somewhat related, when I messed up a partition table and had to fix xfs is when I learned you don't pick a file system by performance numbers, you pick it based on the tools available for it. I got my data back, but it would have been 10x easier if I were using ext at the time.

 

[INSTG8R]

Building a new rig with new case.. put the USB case header on “backwards” tested it with my G25 Wheel, dead...not satisfied I tried my brand new 64GB flash drive, dead...

 

[looniam]

i thought it wasn't a bad idea to quick check my q6600 installation w/o a heatsink; i had gotten some TIM on the socket pins and it would thermal trip, right?

it became a ~$250 paperweight.

sorry guys i just remembered this one

story #2:

i was totally stoked to upgrade to a K5-133 to compete w/my buddy's P90.
backstory: another buddy helped me build my rig; first DIY and he install the cpu, ram, motherboard in the case and atx power before he had to go. really that just left the storage and OS (dos/wfwg) install for me.

Spoiler

so no, i had no idea about a ZIFF socket.

after taking the one side off and laying the tower on it's other side, i looked down at the cpu (no heat sink in those days kids) i probed around w/finger before i got a short but wide blade flat screw driver and worked my way around the edges of the cpu. after a minute, that seemed like 20, the cpu was off and all the pins and socket were looking good.

now installing the K5 . . i placed it on the socket and gently pushed thinking something will magically "click." after a few tries w/no magic and checking the pins on the chip, i set it on/in the socket, powered up and the machine booted! i was excited until i would set the tower upright and the cpu would fall out. after further considerations, a strategically placed piece of scotch tape corrected that issue.

however, before finishing up, i decided to call my buddy who helped me build the machine, he wasn't home before, to complain about having to use scotch tape. after several minutes of laughter and amazement nothing got borked, he asked me if i see a little lever next to the socket . . .

 

[Ahhzz]

Boneheaded mistakes? Yeah, I got one. This was back in the days of FDISK, which as many of you know it's an old time utility used to partition disks. I think you may know where I'm going with this one. So anyways, I knew I needed to delete some partitions to repartition one of my drives but as you may have guessed, I accidentally chose the wrong disk and blew away my system drive. That was a fun evening. From that moment on FDISK become known to me as Fucked Disk.

Reminds me of the old gag:
Ask a Mac to format a system drive, and it says "I will format this drive. Yes/No" ; "Warning, this drive will be completely deleted, are you sure? Yes/No" ; "Formatting.
Ask a Windows to format a system drive, it say "Are you sure? Yes/No" ; "Formatting"
Ask a Unix box to format a system drive, and it says "Formatting."

 

[MrGenius]

Building a new rig with new case.. put the USB case header on “backwards”...

I've done similar. Except not backwards, but plugged it into the IEEE 1394 connector by mistake. Which looks identical to USB. But puts out 25 volts(instead of 5V). Good thing I had it disabled in the BIOS beforehand.

 

[John Naylor]

1. My brother was visiting just about the time when PC gaming was into the public consciousness (maybe 1993 ish ?). He sat down to play "7th Guest" and when called for dinner, shut off the light and turned off the PC when he left the room. I immediately ran in and restarted to see if anything terrible happened. At the time had a DOS boot menu w/ 6 different boots, some to DOS (No windows AutoCAD back when) , some to Window and most using 3rd party (Helix Software ... we were a beta test site which, back then, you needed a resume to be included) memory management which was necessary back then for running AutoCAD above the 640k memory limit.

So I start up box and I can't get anywhere because of a low level (SCSI) disk error. If you owned AutoCAD, you generally had 7200 pr 10000 rpm SCSI disks and they were $1,000 for a 1 GB .. It's Friday night and I can't reach TS (back then outsourced our office builds to a CAD system builder using our specs). So on Saturday, I'm working running engineering clacs and my KB had a built in calculator. So I turn on the box, and turn off monitor so i can use KB calculator and don't have to stare at the screen error message. Doing the same on Sunday when I break for lunch and I return to PC and my 3 year old woke up and is playing like Jerry Lee Lewis on the KB. So I turn on the monitor and it's sitting at Windows desktop ... WTH ?

What I later deduced and confirmed via searching was that the SCSI control board, kinda like BIOS, holds a "charge" for lack of abetter word ... and ya need to let it sit w/o power for 10 - 20 minutes when it's shut down like that. Son when I started it up Saturday after being shut down for a while, it was fine ... I just didn't notice cause I

2. When doing a user build, I wasn't getting any signal at the monitor.... so wasted hours looking for issues, thinking the days of manually having to use the OSD to select input type were long gone ... well that was it.

Ones i have experienced from other end.

3. User trying to use fax modem. Wasn't getting anywhere till I asked him to g step by step and describe what he was doing:

a) print out the document
b) Hold face of document against monitor and hit enter

4. Replaced 61 year old's executive assistant IBM Selectric and dictation machine with PC. She had mouse on floor trying to use as replacement for the pedal that started and stopped the tape on dictation machine.

 

[R-T-B]

fdisk is still alive and well: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fdisk
Somewhat related, when I messed up a partition table and had to fix xfs is when I learned you don't pick a file system by performance numbers, you pick it based on the tools available for it. I got my data back, but it would have been 10x easier if I were using ext at the time.

Linux FDISK != MS-DOS FDISK.

See my sig for my most boneheaded moment. Well, maybe.

 

[Nuckles56]

My list of fails have been very small and minor considering, but then again I only got into PC building pretty recently compared to most of the people here. My worst one is putting a blu-ray burner in upside down (with the windows disk already in it) when I was rebuilding his desktop for him. We booted the machine and the drive made this god awful noise. We looked at it and found it upside down. I still worked afterwards, just not very well. And that was the last time I had a beer and built a PC.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I Got one, I have a sata slot dock and when i reinstalled it once i mannaged to force the molex in the wrong way ,blowing my fave 1Tb drive at the time and another i put in to test before i realised, once plugged in right all was fine I had expected the cradle to blow.

 

[HTC]

This didn't happen to me but, just in case fellow TPUers don't know about it, i'll share.

There was a dude installing a program that came in 3 diskettes. After putting disk #1, starting the installation and following it's directions, the program asked for disk #2, and the dude inserted disk #2. A bit later, the program asked for disk #3 and the dude really tried but just couldn't put disk #3.

Turns out the reason he couldn't put disk #3 is because there were already 2 disks in the diskette drive ...

 

[Good Guru]

Ruined 2 mobos running cpu bare die. Killed 2 cpu's put 1 in backwards the other got bent running bare die to waterblock, degraded 1 other cpu. My pc has been on fire 3 times.
Once a cheap water pump burned up in smoke.
Once I hooked a fan wire backwards major smoke blowin out my case.
A cold cathode light switch touched a hdd drive and sparks big time.

Also took out a delidded cpu like 10 times when it was only overheating because the water hoses were backwards to waterblock heh.

Hope any can learn from this lol

 

[AlwaysHope]

Installing stock LGA775 cooler for my DDR2 ram testing machine few days back... that push in, pull down & twist plastic mechanism ALWAYS give me the $%#*(!
Virtually impossible to get an air tight seal when HS makes contact with top of CPU, first time round...
Thank God for aftermarket air coolers...
Hundred time easier they are to install.

 

[hat]

My pc has been on fire 3 times.

That's a sig-worthy quote right there...

 

[Arjai]

Not really my fault, but...

My first computer, actually sitting across the room from me now, was bought at a computer store at the University, pre-built. Socket A Duron. I had it for about 4 days.

I had it in my bedroom, on this desk, I have my laptop on, and I was fast asleep one evening after a long day at work. I was awoken by the sound of a few loud pop's. I turned on the bedside lamp and saw smoke billowing out of the computer case!

I quickly unplugged it and the smoke stopped. I went back to bed.

In the morning, I removed the side panel and nearly all of the capacitors had popped!! The side panel was littered with capacitor goo and smoke trails.

The guys at the shop were amazed! They replaced the motherboard and PSU, free of charge, tested it, CPU survived. Ran great for years. Even ran about 3 different CPU's, overclocked on air. The replaced MSI motherboard finally died, a few years ago. I had a mobile 2500+ in there running 1.1Ghz, on air, for quite a while!

I could not find a working MB for it and so now it sits. Bought a couple DOA's on E-Bay and even tried a few TPU boards that were gifted. I loved that Socket A despite it!! It ran Windows 7, before it died!! Mostly though, it was an XP machine. I held out on XP, until I was having trouble opening some websites!! That was back in the Netscape days! LOL.

/Rant

 

[bug]

Linux FDISK != MS-DOS FDISK.

Of course it is. But it can still ruin your partition table just as good. If not better

 

[remixedcat]

I'm normally super careful (like alex jones paranoid lvl lol) but one time I was playing WoW and I was waiting on some NPC or something to do something with and someone freakin took it so I had to wait and I had to pee, I was on a acer laptop with a trackball mouse, I couldn't wait any longer to go potty so I got up off the chair quick and the ball fell off and shattered the laptop's screen into smithereens. Ugh I felt like crap the rest of the week. had to borrow another compie off my sis at the time, then 1 week later I got a new system.

 

[Vario]

Not really my fault, but...

My first computer, actually sitting across the room from me now, was bought at a computer store at the University, pre-built. Socket A Duron. I had it for about 4 days.

I had it in my bedroom, on this desk, I have my laptop on, and I was fast asleep one evening after a long day at work. I was awoken by the sound of a few loud pop's. I turned on the bedside lamp and saw smoke billowing out of the computer case!

I quickly unplugged it and the smoke stopped. I went back to bed.

In the morning, I removed the side panel and nearly all of the capacitors had popped!! The side panel was littered with capacitor goo and smoke trails.

The guys at the shop were amazed! They replaced the motherboard and PSU, free of charge, tested it, CPU survived. Ran great for years. Even ran about 3 different CPU's, overclocked on air. The replaced MSI motherboard finally died, a few years ago. I had a mobile 2500+ in there running 1.1Ghz, on air, for quite a while!

I could not find a working MB for it and so now it sits. Bought a couple DOA's on E-Bay and even tried a few TPU boards that were gifted. I loved that Socket A despite it!! It ran Windows 7, before it died!! Mostly though, it was an XP machine. I held out on XP, until I was having trouble opening some websites!! That was back in the Netscape days! LOL.

/Rant

That was the "capacitor plague" from that time period probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

 

[R-T-B]

Of course it is.

In code lineage?

No it's not.

PS: I know, I'm no fun. My computer's only been on fire once. Sorry.

 

[sepheronx]

This was couple days ago.

Thought I botched my GPU when I was adjusting a machine and turned it back on to see that it wasn't displaying the DVI mode. Anyway, I powered off machine, fiddled around with power connectors, turned it back on and still same issue.

Turned out it was because it was still connected to my TV via HDMI and that is why I couldn't see it on the monitor. Took me only half an hour to figure it out...

 

[Arjai]

That was the "capacitor plague" from that time period probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Good read. I had no idea! Now I know why everyone is so high on Japanese Solid Capacitors! That post has made sense of my little World. It's as though a light has been turned on. I feel like a large portion of my chaotic soul has been put in order!

OK, I'll stop. Mostly because I COULD go on, and on.

 

[Vario]

Good read. I had no idea! Now I know why everyone is so high on Japanese Solid Capacitors! That post has made sense of my little World. It's as though a light has been turned on. I feel like a large portion of my chaotic soul has been put in order!

OK, I'll stop. Mostly because I COULD go on, and on.

It affected so many boards from that time including I suspect my Biostar N4SLI-A9, as it had some leaking and bulging caps.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Boneheaded mistakes? Yeah, I got one. This was back in the days of FDISK, which as many of you know it's an old time utility used to partition disks. I think you may know where I'm going with this one. So anyways, I knew I needed to delete some partitions to repartition one of my drives but as you may have guessed, I accidentally chose the wrong disk and blew away my system drive. That was a fun evening. From that moment on FDISK become known to me as Fucked Disk.

I did that once in the early days of PC tech work. From moment on, everytime a drive needed partitioning, every other drive got unplugged. I still do that in systems with a lot of in-use drives for simplicities sake.

One of my early bonehead moments was way back in the AT PSU days. Plugged in the connectors backwards. Pressed the power switch and POOF! When you see the magic blue smoke, electronics don't work anymore. Luckily, the motherboard was all that died. Still pricey mistake. That was when the phrase "Black next to black is a friend to Jack, red next to yellow will kill a fellow." was taken to heart and committed to memory permanently.

It affected so many boards from that time including I suspect my Biostar N4SLI-A9, as it had some leaking and bulging caps.

Easy to replace though.