So, I seem to be cursed.

[Chiropteran]

First, I decided to see if my quad core board properly supported 8 GB of RAM. Put in one stick, no problem, put in the next stick, apply a little pressure... oops something just broke, there are pieces of plastic rattling around in the case now. Oh well, that board/CPU combo had crashing problems anyway, it's randomly rebooted during heavy load the last few months. I decided to swap my motherboards, because I had a good working PC in a really crappy case that I wanted to put in my nicer case. Well, in the process of unplugging cables, I bumped the SATA cable going to my Raptor HD and broke off the connector on the hard drive.

Luckily that drive didn't have any important data. The rest of the motherboard swap went fine, and the good system seemed to work fine in the good case.

This morning, I come in and my computer is turned off, when I know I left it running last night. Power button doesn't turn the system on. I check to see if the power supply is plugged in and turn on (yes & yes) and notice the smell. Yeah, burned electronics. I look around a little and see no noticeable damage on the main board, so I remove and replace the power supply. In the process of removing the power cable going to the main board, I knock the SATA cable on my Raptor HD and break it off. Again. This drive has some data I need as well. Fortunatly I am able to run the drive by sticking the connector in, I'll probably tape it on for the short term until I can replace the drive, but dammit why are those things so fragile? I've never broken one before yesterday, but now I have broken two in two days.

Anyway, I finish replacing the power supply and the computer comes up fine. Now I am thinking my problems on the quad core system were all power supply related and if I had just replaced it there wouldn't have been any need to swap motherboards. /sigh


Cliff notes.
Past 24 hours I have killed:
2 WD Raptor Hard Drives
1 Antec Truepower 550W PS
1 Memory Slot on P5B Premium Mainboard

 

[AmberClad]

Yeouch...what is it with people having their Antec TPs taking out their rigs recently ...
Sorry to hear about all that. That is quite the series of misfortunes .

 

[nerp]

Sounds like a Donald Duck cartoon where he stops to change a flat tire, then ends up blowing up the entire car and getting his body stuck in the spare tire after a chain of increasingly frustrating problems.

Sucks. I've gotten into negative loops before and that temporary feeling of not knowing what the problem is scary.

 

[Chiropteran]

Yeah it was some pretty crappy luck or carelessness on my part. In any case I was actually a little happy about discovering the power supply was the problem, since it means my core 2 quad is probably perfectly good.

As far as the dead raptor drives, it was time to upgrade to a velociraptor anyway.

 

[JasonandBecky]

I had that luck for a bit. I found out the power (wiring) in my basement was causing it. I ended up getting a very high quality APC and it solved it. Too bad it killed a number of computer parts (and my wallet) before I figured it out.