PCA Forums

I've got 2 that I'm less than proud of:

Goof 1:

I was swapping out an old case to go from AT to ATX so old AT motherboard replace to ATX, and AT power supply swapped to ATX. I had taken the PSU off the mains and turned everything off so I thought I was safe.

WRONG!

I was unscrewing the switch that turns the AT supply on and off and happened to touch the 2 sides together with the screwdriver. All the capacitors that were still holding their charge give me one hell of a jolt. These days I know better and leave any old PSU's for 24hours to discharge...

Goof 2:

Had some maintenance work to do in one of our small server rooms at the weekend the same weekend the mains power was being turned off to the building. I did everything I needed to do with the servers, shut everything down and went home.

Came back early the next day and brought everything up and running again. Did health checks etc. everything is good. What I didn't notice is that the air conditioning in this little room hadn't come back on with the rest of the mains power.

Skip forward to Monday morning and everything is beeping it's head off in there. I open the door and it's like an oven in there, you could have fried an egg on top of one of the servers. Fortunatly nothing was damaged but major goof and it took 3 hours to cool everything down again.

Come on don't be shy, what major goofs have you made?

Darkheart

I was building a small ICS server out of some old parts. Among the things I was changing were the processor (old P133) and the power supply. I had set the new processor on top of the old power supply was I was screwing the new power supply in. I was sitting on the floor on one side of the case and reached over to look at something on the other side. Without thinking, I tilted the case to one side to get a better view. Right about then, I heard a bang as the new PS (yet to be screwed in) slid out of the case and onto the old PS, catching the chip in the middle. It ws actually kind of funny b/c if you looked at the pins of the chip at the right angle, you could actually see the edge of the PS indented in the pins! I actually thought it was pretty funny, probably b/c it was only $20 to get a new chip. But boy did I feel stupid!

i plugged in the usb port connectors from the a7v bracket to the smbus connector. turned the computer on a "Zap" i shorted the connectors out, but the board still worked.

I have to add new hard drives occasionally or transfer over info from one to the other, well I usually just leave the second hdd loose in the case while I transfer over the informationand then pull the old one and replace it with the new one. I kept getting errors while moving the files over and it got worse each try, I knew the hdd wasn't bad I was just putting in a bigger drive, so I pulled out the hdd to take a look at it and make sure everything was plugged in right when I noticed that the PC speaker was attached to the bottom of the case instead of the front and the drive had been sitting on it the whole time of course I had lost over half of the information on the drive and I couldn't do anything about it other than tell my boss of my gaff. It's kinda funny now tho'.

my suitemate and a foriegn exchange student were working on getting the forieng exchange students computer working. his parents had just sent it from either norway or sweeden (cant remember which). the power supply on it didn't switch over to the correct voltage so they had to get a new one. my suitemate had unpluged everything and replaced the power supply. he then realized the switch on the case was wierd and he didn't know how to connect the four leads to the switch. so we saw what we though was the right way to put it on. turned on the power and blew out all the lights in a quarter of the dorm. it turns out we had something switched wrong and we blew a fuse.

Upgrading from a P200MMx to a P233MMx.....LOL

Hmmm... back in the 486 days I put a CPU in backwards. (yes this was possible). Turned in on. No lights. Started to smell burning. I shut the computer off and corrected the cpu and suprisingly the thing booted fine (probably running on half the transistors). Of course I was about 15 years old and had 30 computers to manage (grade 9 and sysGOD muahahaha).

I deleted a teacher's userspace accidentaly. Try explaning to the school board why you're 15 and messing with the servers...

Once I installed a Tape drive on a server and improperly terminated (stupid jumpers!!!). I ran Backup Exec and somehow turned all 8 gigs of info into alphabet soup.

monitor repair. DON'T touch that little metal band that goes around the CRT!!!! imagine a charge powerful enough to knock a 250lb person to the ground.

killing 1 scsi raid card, 3 cheetahs, 2 2940uw's and 2 soyo boards...Let that be a lesson 2 ya SOYO SUKS ASs!

Greg

care to elaborate, greg?

it was all the soyo boards fault. it didnt like scsi. Lousy POS! it was there sba6 or somethign liek that. the Bigest POS there ever was! and then they have a Bios release 2 Fix that...well NO! I am never buying one of there products again.

Greg

Well I think my hardware goof is the biggest of them all

I once bought a packard hell computer

Please don't tell on me

Alex

Once I was upgrading the memory in a old school IBM PS2 or something at work and when I got to the PC I took it apart and put the RAM in. Then I noticed that the PC wasn't really off when I put the RAM in, he just had the monitor off. It had a reqlly quiet fan in the PS and I didn't hear it and never noticed the LED was on until I went to power up the PC. I wasn't exactly in a quiet environment so I never heard it running. I said something to the guy to draw this attention away from the PC, switched it off and then back on. Lucky for me the thing booted and all the memory worked fine. I still can't believe I did that and didn't notice it was on.

-Bad flash an old DTK board, just because it didn't pass the millenium bug test.


-Bad flash an Abit BH6 bios!!! I ask tech support to ship me another bios chip, which they did. And the board still don't work....


I will never flash a bios again....

Does running Q3A in one of the new servers and taking down about a dozen other/new servers count? You figured w/couple million dollars worth of equipments, you should at least be able to play some games from time to time.