Bonehead Tech Moments

[MaxTheLimit]

Recently I made a major bonehead mistake while re-running a cable run for a system followed by another. After the cable run and hooking things back up the system wouldn't power back on. Through WAY too much checking I finally realized that it was the PSU that wasn't turned on. This is bad enough, but afterward the system still wouldn't turn back on. After even more terrible annoying checking I realized I'd left the jumper set to clear CMOS. Moved back and resetting the BIOS settings back to previous settings and all was well. Needless to say...very embarrassing.

I was wondering if there is any interesting bonehead moments that Fellow gerbils are willing to share. I'm sure we all have at least one. What's your best 'Bonehead Tech Moment'?

[ludi]

The power supply switch is an old favorite. I did it to myself again last month.

Probably my all-time favorites, though, include:

1. Overclocking a K6-2/400 to 500MHz with bigger and bigger heatsinks. While attempting to install the latest GlobalWin creation, I torqued my Super 7 board too hard and voila, computer no starty. I reverted to a spare Pentium 100 for about a week while waiting for the replacement to arrive, during which time I contemplated the volatility of BGA chips. I had lots of time for this, since my regular addiction of TFC was not P100 friendly (although Starcraft, single-player, would run somewhat playably).

2. Adding a heatsink to my Visiontek GeForce2MX in hopes I might be able to overclock a little more out of it. Screwdriver slips and punches the board, hard. SMT capacitor gets ground right off. Fascinatingly enough, the card still worked, no worse for the wear. A couple years I later pulled this same trick while attempting to install a stubborn heatsink clip on an Asus Socket A, this time nicking three tightly-spaced traces near the CPU. Bye-bye Asus. Fortunately, I had an entire stash of hardware by this time, and my main system wasn't even involved.

3. Buying a Voodoo Banshee with a MIR. Got it installed, everything was cool, happened to chuck the box into the dormitory dumpster out back when changing my trash out. Forgot to clip the UPC first. Oops.

4. Selling the aforementioned Banshee a year and a half later after my next upgrade was completed. I still wish I had kept that thing!

[fpsduck]

- Bought 2 units of Pentium II OverDrive (Pentium Pro with MMX)
without knowledge that my motherboard can support dual processors with these things or not.
Yes, I had to buy another socket 8 mobo from eBay to make the most from my first mistake.
But thanks to that. Now I'll check compatibility list carefully before buying anything.

- On my first computer assembling, I spend half-day with no boot to figure out
that I connected the floppy drive cable in the wrong way.

[idchafee]

We had a whole room full of monitors. One of the guys plugged them all in, and seperated them into dead and living. He came back down and said "the dead ones are on the left." A couple of us went to chuck the dead ones into the compactor. Grab the pile on the left, run them down to the smasher. Great fun, slinging them down there and then watching them get crushed. We go back upstairs and it turns out that he meant the pile on the left as you are looking out towards the door. We crushed the pile that was on the left as we went into the room. We crushed the living pile.

[FroBozz_Inc]

We had a whole room full of monitors. One of the guys plugged them all in, and seperated them into dead and living. He came back down and said "the dead ones are on the left." A couple of us went to chuck the dead ones into the compactor. Grab the pile on the left, run them down to the smasher. Great fun, slinging them down there and then watching them get crushed. We go back upstairs and it turns out that he meant the pile on the left as you are looking out towards the door. We crushed the pile that was on the left as we went into the room. We crushed the living pile.

That's a good one right there. They should have labeled the piles.

One time I had a couple extra (known working) harddrives laying around. They were 7200rpm Quantum KA drives if I recall.
I was setting up a PC for my Mom, and I was going to use one of these drives for this box.
I put the drive into the slot, and realized that the computer didn't recognize it. I checked cabling and BIOS settings and such, and was like OK - reality check time. So I put the 2nd drive into the same exact spot in the case as the first one. Same result.
Turns out I was inserting the drives slightly wrong, and a raised metal area inside of the drive area frame was touching the bottom of the drive.
So I shorted and and broke two (out of warranty) drives because I inserted them both consistently wrong.

Stiffie's story wins.

[Hoser]

Putting together a system for a friend from spare parts I had lying around (MSI K8N NEO & 3500+), the only thing I had to buy was an optical drive. I get most of it together and then go out and buy one. Come home install the optical drive...double check all my connections.....everything looked good. I plugged it in and turned it on........POST screen comes up no problem, but then it just goes blank. Check connections again...everything looks fine...plug in PSU...push power button...fans spin up for a second then nothing happens. This happens 4 times before I realize that I forgot to attach the heatsink in the CPU. Luckily when I installed the heatsink the thing fired right up. *whew*

[iamajai]

Left work early to visit the neighbourhood NCIX. Bought new 7900GS vid card. Giddy with joy installing it before the SO gets home from work. Boots up, go to install drivers, halfway through and it locks up. Try again, same thing. Call BFG tech support, no help. Frantically reinstall old 9800Pro before SO gets home.

Next day, take the 7900GS back, they check it, works great...hand it back to me. WTH. Back home try again, and this time there's a 6-pin connector that I hadn't noticed before. Oh ho! Plug that in. Everything works great. SO none the wiser...hehehe

[drfish]

A month or so ago:
Bought a USB floppy drive for installing RAID drivers on XP installs, confirmed that I picked one that would work for this (some don't), used it a couple times successfully, saved me some headaches...

This morning:
Go to use it today, not expecting any problems, disable the regular floppy controller since I learned it often interferes, but the XP install won't recognize the drive after the first time it reads drivers from it (it needs them again during the file copy phase). Try the reinstall three more times with the same result despite various BIOS adjustments (turn off USB 2.0, turn on legacy support, etc) but still nothing... So I take off the side of the case and prepare to do it old-school when I notice a ribbon cable is already running out of the floppy connector... The frickin system had a floppy installed all along but I didn't notice because it's on the floor behind the rack in the server room. Smooth.

[derFunkenstein]

When I worked at the local computer shoppe when I was in college, a guy brought in his newly-assembled computer (made from parts that we sold him) because it'd power on but nothing happened. Socket A system with a TBird 900. First thing I did was power it on, of course, and yes, nothing happened. Shut it down, popped off the heatsink, and the core was missing. He'd installed hte heatsink without any paste and the core popped. He didn't just let out the smoke; there was a burn mark and the core was MISSING. It was AWESOME. He had to buy a new mobo and a new CPU because the mobo had a blackened mark in the middle of hte socket and I refused to reassemble with that machine and possibly kill another CPU.

[MaxTheLimit]

Putting together a system for a friend from spare parts I had lying around (MSI K8N NEO & 3500+), the only thing I had to buy was an optical drive. I get most of it together and then go out and buy one. Come home install the optical drive...double check all my connections.....everything looked good. I plugged it in and turned it on........POST screen comes up no problem, but then it just goes blank. Check connections again...everything looks fine...plug in PSU...push power button...fans spin up for a second then nothing happens. This happens 4 times before I realize that I forgot to attach the heatsink in the CPU. Luckily when I installed the heatsink the thing fired right up. *whew*

that's a good one. I recently attached the CPU cooler without putting in the CPU. Screwing the Cooler mount to the backplate when I notice the CPU in the plastic guard beside me...DOH!

Thankfully I didn't even have the second screw halfway in yet.

[dextrous]

I worked on a process control server yesterday. In the process of troubleshooting, I swapped the CPU out with another one.

Today, a couple guys that work on the desktops here came to my office and handed me a CPU. "Notice anything wrong?" they said with a goofy smile on their faces. Looked fine to me..... So I asked, "What's wrong with it? Looks like a processor to me." Their reply was, "What happened to all the pins???? What did you do to it yesterday?!"

This was a LGA775 CPU. I died laughing.

[ludi]

Actually, I nearly forgot my favorite: I have this small recliner that I bought from a thrift store when I went to college. I don't know what exactly the upholstry is -- wool, silk, and polyester woven into rough-textured fabric might be a good guess -- but it is comfortable, and it REALLY makes static.

One Friday afternoon during my freshman year, I pulled the recliner up to my computer desk, tilted the monitor down toward the chair, and fired up an emulator for some old-fashioned NES fun. Gamepad in hand -- this was the old days and it was plugged into my ISA soundcard's gameport -- I played for a spell and then decided to get up for a soda. I pulled myself up off the recliner to hit the "pause" button on the keyboard, and the second my feet hit the floor, an enormous jolt went from my hand into the gamepad and back to the soundcard. The right channel died instantly; the left channel was faint and staticky.

Two days later, both channels came back, and worked fine until the day that card was scrapped.

[adampk17]

Recently I bought a new motherboard and as I went about the preparation and process of re-installing Vista 64 I disconnected my second hard drive and left just my boot hard drive and my SATA Samsung optical drive attached. I popped in the Vista DVD tried to boot from it. The system acted like the DVD wasn't in the drive, it never even tried to boot from the DVD! To make a long story short, after checking and triple checking of the boot order and other settings in the BIOS and starting to get pissed off that this motherboard wouldn't try to boot from an optical drive I realized that I had disconnected my optical drive and had left my second hard drive, a Samsung F1, connected!!!! All I saw was Samsung as the BIOS detected drives and thought I had everything right. Man was I pissed at myself.

Many moons ago back in the original Pentium days I smoked a power supply because unbeknownst to me one of the internal power supply cords got caught in the case side as I slid it on to close it. It cut the insulation down to bare wire and when I turned it on it went POP! Damn is that smell stinky!

Another story from work - A user called because their computer wouldn't power on in the morning. This was a rather old AMD Thunderbird 1.3G system and the orb coolers were prone to going bad. The fan on the cooler had died in this system and as we unhooked the HSF we noticed that the CPU looked kind of funny, something was wrong. It took us a moment to realize that the CPU core had stuck to the bottom of the HSF when we lifted it out! Obviously that was a problem.

[Alabama_Enigma]

I had an interesting conversation with a customer yesterday. We sold him a new custom system recently and he brought it back to my store yesterday with fire in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong and he pretty much screamed at me that the "stupid system" couldn't do the most basic tasks. After playing 20 questions with him, he finally told me that the system works fine in every respect, but it won't divide when using the windows calculator. I told him that I had never seen a problem like that, but I'd be happy to take a look at it.

I fired up the system and started the calculator. I typed in 15/5 and got 3. I told him that that it looked like it worked fine to me.

He proceeded to type in a calculation and said "SEE!!! The @$!@ doesn't work!" I asked him to do it again and he said "EVERY time I type in 225 and divide by 15, it gets stuck on 15."

I had to explain to him that 225/15 = 15 and the calculator was showing him the correct answer.

[Captain Ned]

Well, my recent PC days have been smooth sailing, so no nasty stories. The best I've got is from the late '70s at my father's insurance office. They'd put in a (for the time) minicomputer, their first real box. Once installed, Dad dropped the manuals on my desk at home saying "You're taking computer classes at high school (on a PDP-8), you tell me where this will break". I spent months with the manuals and never did find a way into the OS or applications. My bad day came when the hardware tech showed up to replace a failed power supply. Unlike today's units, this was [/handwave] a 6U high/full depth unit weighing at least 200lb and was in a tray at the bottom of the box. We got the original out and were sliding in the replacement. The tech gave it a mighty shove to seat it, but I had failed to get my left index finger out of the way. Luckily, the blood spilled did not short out the new PSU so I could go off to the ER for my stitches with no shame. Thirty years later, I still bear an ugly scar on that finger.

[king_kilr]

See viewtopic.php?f=13&t=62834

[MaxTheLimit]

Haha, the irony of that happening the same day I made this thread is just too perfect.

[Hance]

I had a power supply with two fans in it one of them was dying. I pulled the PSU out of the system and jumped the connector so it would turn on. I did that so I could figure out which fan was making all the noise. Once I figured out which fan was dying I grabbed a screw driver and went to swapping out the dead fan. Me being the smart guy that I am left the power cord plugged into the PSU. I have been shocked a lot of times in my life but this SOB HURT. I screamed like a little girl and pulled the psu off the desk when I fell over backwards. The wife comes running into my office all are you ok ?

[2_tyma]

forgot to plug in the usb header ground and everytime i plugged in a usb device it shutdown
felt real stupid.

[nerdrage]

At my old job in the late 90s, I was fixing a PC on-site at a client's business. The client was this nasty mean old woman. I think I was upgrading the RAM on the machine. It was one of those awful old desktop cases (the horizontal kind where the monitor sits on top of it) and it was VERY proprietary and VERY heavy steel. The CD-ROM and hard drive were mounted into the top cover of the case, rather than the base, and there were ribbon cables and power LED cables threaded through to the mobo in a tangled mess. Removing it would have been more trouble than it was worth, so I just removed enough screws to let me into the case to install the RAM while supporting the now loose top of the case with one hand (remember, it was heavy steel, and the CD-ROM and hard drive were mounted to it). Of course, it slipped, and it fell at an awkward angle crashing into the motherboard. Machine would no longer boot after that. Turned out it had partially ripped up a surface mounted IC on the motherboard. Since I had no soldering iron with me, I had to bring the machine back to our shop and carefully re-solder the IC back onto the motherboard. And it actually worked fine after that

In the early 90s, at my first tech job, I misread the Engrish instructions for wiring an AT power supply switch. I think there were four colors, black, white, brown and blue? Anyways, I wired it into a short-circuit, and when I turned it on, BANG! The power cable melted, but didn't blow any fuse or circuit breaker in the building

[ludi]

I had to explain to him that 225/15 = 15 and the calculator was showing him the correct answer.

You're lucky he wasn't looking for the square root key. He might not have responded well to your offer to sell him a MathCAD license.

[Jigar]

Fresh, 2 days back, made a PC for my friend. Installed the mobo and did the wiring. Quad core CPU with Thermaltake 120 Ultra. PC started normally, and i did the installation and tweaking for around an hour, no problems.

Went back home, got a call from my friend after 3 hours, he told me that system buzzer was making a lot of noise since past 10 mins. Went to his house, PC was still on and functioning properly, after looking into the cabinet, my hand just touched the heat sink, dam that was hot. I realized the Heatsink fan wire was not connected, but because of Thermaltake, PC was still going good. I felt very embarrassed, cause i have assembled more than 50 PC till now, but never made such a blunder.

[Flying Fox]

Fresh, 2 days back, made a PC for my friend. Installed the mobo and did the wiring. Quad core CPU with Thermaltake 120 Ultra. PC started normally, and i did the installation and tweaking for around an hour, no problems.

Went back home, got a call from my friend after 3 hours, he told me that system buzzer was making a lot of noise since past 10 mins. Went to his house, PC was still on and functioning properly, after looking into the cabinet, my hand just touched the heat sink, dam that was hot. I realized the Heatsink fan wire was not connected, but because of Thermaltake, PC was still going good. I felt very embarrassed, cause i have assembled more than 50 PC till now, but never made such a blunder.

It's Thermalright my friend.

[Jigar]

Fresh, 2 days back, made a PC for my friend. Installed the mobo and did the wiring. Quad core CPU with Thermaltake 120 Ultra. PC started normally, and i did the installation and tweaking for around an hour, no problems.

Went back home, got a call from my friend after 3 hours, he told me that system buzzer was making a lot of noise since past 10 mins. Went to his house, PC was still on and functioning properly, after looking into the cabinet, my hand just touched the heat sink, dam that was hot. I realized the Heatsink fan wire was not connected, but because of Thermaltake, PC was still going good. I felt very embarrassed, cause i have assembled more than 50 PC till now, but never made such a blunder.

It's Thermalright my friend.

LOL, yeah funny thing is my vendor also never corrected me on this and i have already bought 5 of them

Thanks FF

[highlandr]

One of my first builds I put together, I only used 4 mounting posts for the MB. A few months later, I was tinkering with the RAM, which was outside those 4 posts, and while I was pushing it in the MB flexed enough to physically touch the tray, and not a gradual flex, but more like a sharp bend. That board never booted again.

The guy I work with was putting together a machine with bad lighting, and managed to catch the negative fan wire under his RAM. He just pushed it in (which stripped back some insulation from the wire), and that board never booted again.

So, I always use enough mounting posts, and he makes sure he has enough light when he's working. Important lessons learned, all around.

[piccolopete]

The worst thing that comes to my mind happened many many moons ago, when DTK was still in the US market as a VAR. Working part time in a mom/pop shop, I'm installing a new Seagate 100 MEGAbyte drive and I plug the power connector in and power it up. POOF!!! The drive toasts. I look at the connector - yep, it's installed right. Try another with the same results. =-( Upon further examination, DTK had used splitters to give more power connectors for drives. THEY had plugged the splitter in backward! Fortunately my boss was understanding and didn't make me pay for the drives.

[SpotTheCat]

I once woke up to a bad smell at my parents house. After looking around for a long time I realized that it was coming from a computer. I turned it off and opened it up. To my horror the thing had never been cleaned. There was a layer of dust thicker than a sweater on every opening. The hard drive was burning hot, one of the fans had seized shut, and the power supply was filled with dust, and smelled really bad. After I cleaned it out, it got flaky and died. Neglect FTL.

[bthylafh]

I stuck my finger in an Athlon XP's OEM fan while it was spinning and broke a blade off. I've killed at least one motherboard when using a flathead screwdriver to mount a Socket A heatsink, after the driver slipped out. Bent a few CPU pins in my time, but those were back when one had a reasonable number of pins, so fixable. Killed a floppy drive by mis-aligning the power plugs, which released the Magic Smoke.

When I built my first computer back in '00, I didn't understand how to use the standoffs so I didn't use them. Fortunately didn't get a short. When I built that box, I also didn't initially mount the heatsink (my previous 486SX didn't have one, so how necessary are they, right?). Worked for about 20 minutes before shutting itself down. Worked fine after I put a cheap old Socket 7 heatsink on. Yay Celeron-533A.

[Kurotetsu]

The time I built my very first PC in the summer of 2001.

I had installed the motherboard and power supply and decided to do a check and see if the power LED on the motherboard would come on. After it didn't, to my horror, I nearly pulled my hair out trying to figure out what went wrong (I had assumed I had static shocked something and killed the board). I went over to my next door neighbor who was fairly knowledgeable (more than me anyway) and asked if he could help me out. He came over, took one look at the mess that was my workspace and pointed to the bag of screws that came with the MB.

"Those are the spacers for the motherboard...did you screw motherboard directly onto the case?"

"...umm, yes?"

Ah, yes, you never forget the wonderful feeling of being the target of a 'Wow, you're a special kind of idiot' look that techies usually level at everyone else.

[UberGerbil]

Haven't done one in a while; the last one I remember was several years ago when I thought I was dealing with a bad PSU (system failing to boot or shutting down almost immediately, other things like CPU cooling already checked). Had a multimeter handy so I thought I'd just see what I was getting on the rails. Stuck one the probes into the wrong pin on the molex plug, and the PSU made a nice POP. Is the PSU bad? Well, now it is. (Turns out it was bad caps on the motherboard, and the PSU actually seemed to work after that, but it got retired anyway).

The first really memorable one was my first year at college, in the 80s, when I arrived with my Apple ][+ (dude, I'm old -- this was the first personal computer most of my fellow students had seen; in my entire 8-storey dorm, there was one other guy with a computer, and that was all the two of us needed to achieve permanent hopeless nerd status). I plugged my beloved ][ into the only available power socket, which happened to be on the same circuit as our little fridge. I had never even heard the term "surge suppressor." I learned all about them right after the first time the fridge compressor turned off while I was editing code -- every semi-colon on the screen turned into a "3". (Pop quiz: how many bits do you need to flip to achieve that?

Oh, and I pulled a peripheral card from a (different) Apple ][ once, while it was running. They don't like that. There were no LEDs inside and no fans, so it was impossible to tell if the machine was on or not, and you know how you're supposed to leave the power cord plugged in to counter static? Yeah.