Smoke came out of molex cable

[tomi19]

I was trying to install an IDE hard drive using a IDE to SATA adapter, I connected everything but when I went to plug the molex cable to the hard drive, as soon as the pins touched it sparked and smoke came out as well as a strong burning smell. I immediately removed the power cord from the power supply. The PSU smelled like burning plastic on the inside.

I took my PC and tried it with a friend's PSU. It posted OK to the BIOS, and detected every component ok. There was one problem though, at first it rebooted itself a couple of times and I got the message

"Power supply surges detected during the previous power on.
Asus Anti-surge was triggered to protect system from unstable power supply unit!
Press F1 to Run Setup"

After that, the PC wouldn't turn on. I disconnected the PSU, waited 5 mins and tried again. This time it ran fine for 15min without rebooting (just in the BIOS).

I also tried it with my friend's hard drive, but as soon as the windows boot logo appeared, the PC rebooted. I believe this must be because my PC is entirely different from his and I would have to reinstall Windows)

Does any of this mean my motherboard or CPU are dead or failing? I must say I'm not sure of the reliability of my friend's PSU either, but it works fine on his PC so I don't know

 

[ronbo613]

Is it the only hard drive in your system? Sparks and hard drives are not good, they have circuit boards in them. Since it kind of worked in another system, it may be OK. It does sound like your power supply may be fried. If that's all it is, it's an easy fix.

 

[C1]

Lots of bad procedure going on here.

Never plug/unplug major connectors when the power is on/system energized. (Just disconnecting power from a coil will result in an inductive created high voltage spike because of field collapse; electronics 101 lesson.)

Also, "I tried it with my friends hard drive", is a no no if you mean that you transferred your friends HDD to your PC as a test. Booting up an installed system with new hardware will write to the installed OS on the HDD in attempt to adapt to the new hardware. Also, if it's Windows, then the OS will not tolerate significant hardware changes as per MS built-in copy/security protection.

Recommend pulling the whole system down then test and verify functioning each time as individual pieces are added back on/in.

 

[LTC8K6]

Never do that sort of work with the power on.

You can do all sorts of damage.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Never do that sort of work with the power on.

You can do all sorts of damage.

THIS!!!

 

[ronbo613]

Never do that sort of work with the power on.

You can do all sorts of damage.

Perhaps the OP has learned this valuable lesson from this experience. Live and learn, eh?

 

[tomi19]

I thought I'd give a follow up. It appears I only fried my PSU, I tested it shorting the 24 pin with a clip and it does not power on. All the other components appear to work fine testing them with another power supply, at least the BIOS detects everything with no problems. I've ordered a new PSU and hard drive, they should arrive next week.

By the way, I know you don't do this with the power on, I just turned off my PC and totally forgot to unplug the cable from the PSU. Lesson learned though, I will know triple check every time I do something like this.

Thanks for your help

 

[LTC8K6]

Never let the magic smoke out. You can never put it back in.