And now the computer room smells like smoke...

[feren]

... because I blew up the malfunctioning hard drive. Literally. I powered on Curmudgeon's PC, there was a spark, smoke came out of the vicinity of the spark and then all was silent. After I powered the PC down I took the offending, smoke-emitting drive from the chassis and found molten slag on top of an IC. The slag was still smoldering. Nearby was another IC with a pit blown out of it. I surmise that the slag came from that pit.

Root cause analysis of the spark determined that I managed to somehow overcome the keying on the MOLEX->SATA power connector -- ultimate I was putting +12VDC on the pin that was expecting +5, I was putting +5 VDC on the pin that was expecting +12 and I swapped the grounds around too (the ground-swapping was the least of this drive's worries). If what I'm saying doesn't make sense, look here. In short, "I made the yellow go to red and the red go to yellow," because I am a complete idiot. Fucking good thing I took a snapshot with Acronis of the drive before I started all this effort or Curmudgeon would be well and truly boned by my ineptitude.

I am not a happy camper.

I'm going to bed now. If I'm very lucky I won't accidentally cause the bed to explode, or something.

Comments

[urocyon.livejournal.com]

Everybody catches The Stupid. You've now used your quota and should be safe for a while.

Unless you've an excessive backlog of unused Stupid. In which case, good luck Jim.

[rustitobuck.livejournal.com]

I blame your $employer. Obviously it's been causing damage to your brain.

Mmm...magic smoke.

Ah well, all you did was fry a drive. You've got backups.

You have no idea how many times I've almost plugged a drive in backwards.

My successful component-frying moment involved plugging a 12VDC power supply into a 5VDC USB hub.

[neuracnu.livejournal.com]

BURN IT

BURN IT

ARGGGGGGGH!

[posicat.livejournal.com]

I zorched a Maxtor drive once, and was able to replace the circuit board that controlled the drive, and make it as "all better" as a Maxtor drive can get. Maxtor's apparently have a magical mode known as "let's blow out if the 12v line is connected, and the 5v line goes away for a moment" to fully test a person's molex connector.

[colliedoc.livejournal.com]

You know, none of that made sense. But you know my level of technical ineptitude. So I guess it would probably not be helpful if I just said make everything go orange to cut the difference, eh?

[doomsey.livejournal.com]

he put a square peg into a round hole. and the round hole was kind of square once he was done. :)


(I did something similar once. Fortunately, I just fried a 5.25" floppy disk drive. We all know how useful those are.)

[wolfbrotherjoe.livejournal.com]

An impressive display of destructive learning!

Don't feel too bad. Causing Hardware Faults is just part of your chosen skillset. The important part is that you realized this at some level before you started, and thus had the backup of the data in case something went wrong.

[tarinfirepelt.livejournal.com]

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<I'm going to bed now. If I'm very lucky I won't accidentally cause the bed to explode, or something.>

Why do I see comic potential in this. Have you been to BDs? I blew up the bed pretty badly after the last visit.