- Aug 31, 2002
- 14,278
- 89
- 91
Well it wasn't me, it was my girlfriend.
She was shipped a 100% working rig, since I knew better than to be lifetime technical support, heh.
She booted it up and was transferring files, all was well. It was a fairly rock solid stable rig.
So anyway she wants to put her old HD in the new computer. I advised against it since it had a warranty and its best to just not open the case, maybe once the warranty expires.
She does it anyway WITH THE POWER ON.
Thats not the worst part. The old drive was an IDE drive. The computer only has SATA connections on the PSU and MOBO.
So she tries to shove the SATA power cable into the IDE data connector while the power is on and she shorts it. It powers down, and smells like ozone.
It went viral later. Before it happened I refused to touch the new computer. I actually left the room as soon as she started ripping into her new PC saying "I'm out of here before you break something" because she took none of my advice. And 2 hours later I hear panic in the next room.
So her family comes over and tries the new PSU in her old computer, to see if the PSU fried, also frying her old computer. Hours of troubleshooting a PC that was shipped to her in working condition. God.
LOL that is all.
Any advice for troubleshooting a short?
Information about short:
- Polytech PSU 600w (not my choice but was pre-built), fans spin up and seems to work but fried another computer.
- AM3 gigabyte motherboard.
- AMD FX 8000 something (I'm not up on hardware specs anymore)
- G.Skill DDR3 memory had a burn mark on it
- Radeon HD 7850 fan spins at full speed, no error lights
- Error Speaker gives one long continuous beep, with award BIOS
- BIOS cmos was reset to factory defaults by me, before I said to hell with this computer, you fried it in 2 hours flat, and I'm not testing any components in any of my computers also frying them.
- I suspect the 12v was shorted to the 3.3v, feeding 12v to the 3.3v rail, when she tried to jam the SATA power cable into the IDE data pins, hence the burn mark on the memory
I've actually never seen a computer short THIS bad. Any experience here ATGH?
I've had computers ground out on the case and be fine. I've also accidentally shocked a computer with static, but the computer was grounded and so was I, and that computer was also fine. Never anything like this with dead components everywhere. Its like a massacre of RAM, CPUs, PSUs, and GPUs oh god why would you not turn off the power before adding an IDE drive, not that it would have fit anyway.
She dropped ~$1,000 on the build
Can somewhere like microcenter test parts witout risking any of my rigs. Because oh man is this rig shorted the **** out. Un*******-believable that someone can short out a working build in such short a time frame as well as their working old computer.
Is the entire build bricked as I suspect?
Absolutely none of her computers will post, and reseating hardware does nothing.
She was shipped a 100% working rig, since I knew better than to be lifetime technical support, heh.
She booted it up and was transferring files, all was well. It was a fairly rock solid stable rig.
So anyway she wants to put her old HD in the new computer. I advised against it since it had a warranty and its best to just not open the case, maybe once the warranty expires.
She does it anyway WITH THE POWER ON.
Thats not the worst part. The old drive was an IDE drive. The computer only has SATA connections on the PSU and MOBO.
So she tries to shove the SATA power cable into the IDE data connector while the power is on and she shorts it. It powers down, and smells like ozone.
It went viral later. Before it happened I refused to touch the new computer. I actually left the room as soon as she started ripping into her new PC saying "I'm out of here before you break something" because she took none of my advice. And 2 hours later I hear panic in the next room.
So her family comes over and tries the new PSU in her old computer, to see if the PSU fried, also frying her old computer. Hours of troubleshooting a PC that was shipped to her in working condition. God.
LOL that is all.
Any advice for troubleshooting a short?
Information about short:
- Polytech PSU 600w (not my choice but was pre-built), fans spin up and seems to work but fried another computer.
- AM3 gigabyte motherboard.
- AMD FX 8000 something (I'm not up on hardware specs anymore)
- G.Skill DDR3 memory had a burn mark on it
- Radeon HD 7850 fan spins at full speed, no error lights
- Error Speaker gives one long continuous beep, with award BIOS
- BIOS cmos was reset to factory defaults by me, before I said to hell with this computer, you fried it in 2 hours flat, and I'm not testing any components in any of my computers also frying them.
- I suspect the 12v was shorted to the 3.3v, feeding 12v to the 3.3v rail, when she tried to jam the SATA power cable into the IDE data pins, hence the burn mark on the memory
I've actually never seen a computer short THIS bad. Any experience here ATGH?
I've had computers ground out on the case and be fine. I've also accidentally shocked a computer with static, but the computer was grounded and so was I, and that computer was also fine. Never anything like this with dead components everywhere. Its like a massacre of RAM, CPUs, PSUs, and GPUs oh god why would you not turn off the power before adding an IDE drive, not that it would have fit anyway.
She dropped ~$1,000 on the build
Can somewhere like microcenter test parts witout risking any of my rigs. Because oh man is this rig shorted the **** out. Un*******-believable that someone can short out a working build in such short a time frame as well as their working old computer.
Is the entire build bricked as I suspect?
Absolutely none of her computers will post, and reseating hardware does nothing.
Last edited:
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