Why I love my job...

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FlyingPenguin
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Why I love my job...

Post by FlyingPenguin »

A client has this nice rig his son built for him a while back: Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 4Gb, Asus dual SLI mobo (although he's not a gamer). The guy is a professional photographer and is a heavy Photoshop user.

The PC died 2 weeks ago - refused to POST. He had a freelance tech like me look at it and the geeks at Circuit City. They both told him the mobo was fried and the hard drives (he has two) were dead. He had a job to finish so he bought a high-end HP system at Circuit to finish the job.

He asked me to look at his old PC while he was out of town this week on the off chance I could recover some data from it.

Well, me being a suspicious bastard I seriously doubted the diagnoses of the other noobs that the mobo AND both hard drives were dead. Sure I can picture a dead mobo but the hard drives too? VERY unlikely.

So I'm sitting here two days ago checking the system out and the first thing I discover is that the hard drives are fine. I can see all the data on both of them and they pass a level 4 scan with Spinrite without a problem.

Then I start playing with the mobo. Well when trying to figure out why a mobo won't POST, resetting the CMOS is usually step number 3 or 4. Sure enough after resetting the CMOS the PC POSTed just fine, and booted into Windows. It's been running 3DMark2006 for the past 24 hours as a burn-in test as it's been running just fine.

I haven't called the client yet, but I'm looking forward to it.... :)
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Post by wvjohn »

somebody was foolin' around with some settings, methinks......
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Post by Key Keeper »

LOL sounds like FP needs a new dual sli rig.....
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Post by nexus_7 »

yea, how sad, they were right...its dead.

New RIG for sale.

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Post by ZYFER »

Yup, nothing makes you feel better than making the customer happy. I am betting he is going to wish he came to you first as well. Not to mention probably will be a little pissed at Circuit City at such a horrible diagnosis.

I don't blame you for your doubting, it is really hard for that kind of damage to occur. I have had lightning strike and not cause that much system-wide damage.

Seriously though, you could claim they are right, and its dead and he just tells you to keep the thing. Ofcourse I highly doubt your integrity means so little, but for someone who does not seem to care about that, you know what I mean. Maybe the other "freelancer" was hoping for him to just tell him to keep it? Don't blame him if wants to return the computer back to Circuit City either...
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Post by FlyingPenguin »

Oh he'll get the rig back. He has this thing setup just the way be wants it and he hates his new Vista rig.

Looks like it was corrupt CMOS because sometimes it wouldn't POST at all and sometimes it would start to post and then draw half the POST information screen and lock up.
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Post by Lmandrake »

So how do you fix a corrupt cmos?
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Post by FlyingPenguin »

Reset the CMOS by using the BIOS reset jumper. I think everyone here would have tried that somewhere around step 4 or 5.

What really puzzles me is why these other buffoons also said the BOTH hard drives were dead. Even if they wanted to sell him a new PC at Circuit City, you'd think they'd test the drives and see if they could hit him up for a data recovery and transfer fee. I think it's just incompetence and laziness.

I'm still burning it in to make sure there's no intermittent issues, but so far it's been a rock and has repeatedly rebooted. I was debating updating the BIOS but I really don't like to do that on a client's PC if I don't have to.
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Post by eGoCeNTRoNiX »

Resetting the CMOS is actually step one for me on any PC that won't post. Call me lucky, but 85% of the time it's solved most of my non-post issues haha..

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Post by FlyingPenguin »

I always check RAM, cards, and other things first only because I would hate to lose an important CMOS setting. It's always my last resort. One gotcha is all these new boards that virtualize the SATA controller as an IDE controller for compatibility. Usually they don't default to that mode though, so if it was set that way before hand then Windows will give you fits because the boot drive is on a different address. There's a few other things like that.
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Post by eGoCeNTRoNiX »

FlyingPenguin wrote:I always check RAM, cards, and other things first only because I would hate to lose an important CMOS setting. It's always my last resort. One gotcha is all these new boards that virtualize the SATA controller as an IDE controller for compatibility. Usually they don't default to that mode though, so if it was set that way before hand then Windows will give you fits because the boot drive is on a different address. There's a few other things like that.
Quite True FP. I didn't really think of that, but 99% of the time when it's that type of issue for me it's some old Athlon XP or Celeron/P4 board haha..

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Post by ZYFER »

Yeah, same as FP said, resetting CMOS is after checking connections, fans, etc. (If fan on cpu don't spin, you got a few potential issues)

CMOS settings getting corrupt isn't overly common, but can happen with surges, lightning strikes, etc. That why I press the importance of UPSs to people. But, we all base our diagnostics based on experiences, it will be different for people, just how it is.
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Post by normalicy »

I've found that 75% of the time that someone diagnosed a problem that they were wrong (Geek Squad in particular). Just repaired a PC last week that they misdiagnosed. Said that the monitor was bad. Yeah, it was bad if you consider that the motherboard is shot & not putting out video. It's like they didn't even consider anything else.
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Post by ZYFER »

I guess it just a matter of who sees the computer first then doesn't it normalicy? :)

Surprising any would say a monitor is bad. Don't think I ever see anyone ever bringing those in for them to diagnose...
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Post by normalicy »

I have had plenty of people tell me that their monitor was bad. They figure if the computer powers on, but there's no signal, than the monitor is bad. However, this is the first time that I've had a "tech" misdiagnose it. They actually brought the entire system in to Best Buy to be checked out. Guess they were too lazy to hook their test monitor up or something.
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