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Totally fried computer! Make your guess as to what caused it. With Pictures!

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Well yeah, I've had them put it in there...but it wasn't contacting anything and I still don't think it could do any damage. But you're right, if I had a nickle for every time I fixed 'the network being down' by plugging something back in I'd be a rich man.
 
Aktunka said:


OMG! How dare you insult this screaming machine! This is in fact a PII 300!

It WAS a PII 300. :p As most others have guessed, I would say it was a power surge of some kind. If they did plug a digital phone system cable into the ethernet port, I could see it ruining the ethernet controller and anything else nearby. But the hard drive isn't really nearby. :-/
 
Definitely a power surge-related incident of some type; knowing if the psu was damaged or not would help determine if it was the outlet/electrical service that surged or something internally....
If the psu is fine then SOMETHING caused the mobo to short out, sending incorrect voltages all over the place- digital phone line could have done that, at least in theory........

Either way, looking at the damage and reading the rest of that story leads me to say that bottom line, one thing caused that problem-
Yup, I'm afraid it was stupidity after all.
;)
 
This looks bad...
When I was younger I went to a schoold teaching electronics. There we had much fun connecting 220V AC directly to a vcr's circuit board. Capacitors blew up almost everytime before the fuse blew. However, there where several IC's on the curcuit-board and NONE of them look like your pictures... Extreme!
Maybe they failed real bad at oc'ing? LOL!
 
KaHNZa said:
It WAS a PII 300. :p As most others have guessed, I would say it was a power surge of some kind. If they did plug a digital phone system cable into the ethernet port, I could see it ruining the ethernet controller and anything else nearby. But the hard drive isn't really nearby. :-/

My mom some how broke her keyboard cable, and the metal port on the PS2 connection disconnected from the rest of the cable. I went to use some metal vice type thing to pull it out, and there was a spark, and the system shut down. Turned it back on, hard drive was dead.

Everything else was fine but the drive was dead. I determined it knocked out the drive motor.

Note: Yes. I realize that was a pretty stupid idea.

My point is, a short on the PS2 port knocked out the hard drive. Possibly the same with the ethernet?

Edit: Then again, I didn't see any physical damage on the drive.
 
Another guess for electrical of some kind. The PSU would tell if it was a line voltage problem, or came from somewhere else (NIC). Though how it would destroy a chip on the HD like that is beyond me :eek:

JigPu
 
thats.....lol funny but wow at the same time..yea i have 2 of those machines...dell opti gx pro USB enhanced.....i HATE THEM....id agree about the lightning, but then wouldnt the psu be fried? and if not, wouldnt the board around the psu's plugs be fried? ..thephone line theory isa good one...but u cant exactly just plug an analog phone liine into ethernet since that only has 4 wires and ethernet has 8.....and when an analog phone rings, its only about 40v, when picked up its at 20v, and when still its 10v. so thats not too likely...i know NOTHING about digital phone lines ....no clue how many wires or what the pins look like....but if it was 240v at a ring, u couldnt have just a small wire, itd be much larger than ethernet...and why would it need 240v?....

btw, if u REALLY wanna fix this for this customer, go on ebay ...they have these MBs for like 10bucks on there and they usually come in lots. that is if u dont have any of those lying around the shop. lol great pics, thats halarioius
 
Lol no way! I don't want to fix this for them. Their cheap butts can just buy a new PC instead of trying to get by on the cheap. The majority of the costs associated will be with building a new database for them anyhow hehe. Oh well.
 
There are two things in this world which are eternal. The universe and the stupidity of man and im not even sure about the first one.

- Albert Einstein
 
im guessing the PSU fried, and the overvolt protection didnt work, sending 120 VAC through the comp frying anything it came close to.

btw....

haha, owned.
 
RedDeathDrinker said:
I'll have a guess....

The magic smoke that powers the computer escaped?

You nailed it! Now all we have to do is summon the server genie to put all the magic smoke back in and we will be back in business.
 
I think that it could be a phone line thing. I know that when you ring an analog line, there is some voltage going through. Has to be to make the ringer go. Remember now, analog phone standards have not changed in some decades. The old rotory phones with an actual bell will still work on todays analog lines. And I've seen a few people plug a RJ-11 cable into a RJ-45 socket.

The voltage spike doesn't have to be high, just fast enough to travel the distance before circuts open. That is a lot of damage. Nice clear photos too. Thanks for shareing.
 
A voltage surge seems like it would have caused it, but, I dunno, maybe it's just coincidence that it happened right after they moved it... I was thinking that maybe the little switch on the back of the PSU that changes it from US power to European power got switched, or maybe stuck in the middle on accident. I'm no electrician though, so I'm nopt sure if that would do anything?
 
PunkRawk911 said:
I was thinking that maybe the little switch on the back of the PSU that changes it from US power to European power got switched, or maybe stuck in the middle on accident. I'm no electrician though, so I'm nopt sure if that would do anything?

Maybe that's why my p1 system died. I just kept flipping that switch on the back and had no clue what it did :)
 
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