The "Bad luck with tech" thread

[Bijiont]

I think the worst luck I have had with tech is when I was running a 939 board I walked out of the room for about 20 minutes to make lunch. Heard a loud bang and a flash of light coming from the room. . . Brand new Antec PSU exploded, not fried but exploded. Still have the case with a huge hole in the side of it. To this day I have no idea exactly what happened.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

As the title says, all stories welcome.

I will start.

I decided to rebuild my server since one of the system disks was failing. I used two 80GB drives in software RAID 1 (using windows dynamic disks)

I swapped those drives for two WD 250GB RE (enterprise class) drives I had lying around.

I ran the same RAID 1 using dynamic disks setup. Installed all updates etc, then I installed my HDD monitoring software. This revealed that one of the disks was in worse health than one of the 80GB drives it had just replaced.

Thinking it would be ok for a day or two I continued to set up the server since I needed access to my files.

To my horror I woke up to an un-responsive sever!

On-rebooting the server it would freeze during POST. I tracked this down to the un-healthy drive and once I took the drive out I could get to the boot Windows primary plex or secondary plex boot screen. Thinking it would boot ok I choose to boot the secondary plex since it was the first HDD that failed. A few seconds later BSOD! Nomatter what plex I choose to boot!

Long story sort I aint using dynamic disks anymore, I'm now running a Samsung spinpoint 160GB as the servers system drive with windows backup performing a bare metal backup to a old maxtor 80 drive every night.

So lesson learned. And the server is running great Enough bad luck for the week I would think??

But no!

Today I decided to change all my films on my server that are stored as ISO's to a format that would be more space saving. (this was after reading Thiddy's thread here: http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=603184&page=18 )

So I fired up handbrake and started to re-encode my first film on my main rig, 2 mins later BSOD!

Run prime95 and a core failed Seems my Q6600 has been overvolted so much it is dieing on me I used to run 3.8Ghz @ 1.6Vcore, but then I became unstable and had to up that to 1.65Vcore.

Relising my chip was dieing I backed the Vcore down to 1.56v and went for 3.75Ghz. It booted and I ran prime95. The system just frooze Rebooting I would get a BSOD even when reverting to stock speed

Possibly major PSU issues! That PSU is questionable, I wouldn't be surprised if the caps in it went bad.

And even if the caps look good, they may have just dried up!

 

[jmdixon85]

Possibly major PSU issues! That PSU is questionable, I wouldn't be surprised if the caps in it went bad.

And even if the caps look good, they may have just dried up!

Yes I was hoping I would get the 2nd version of that Cougar PSU that had much better caps when I ordered it off ebay for £35. Turned out to be the first version with the cheapo caps, but I did replace the primary cap with a much higher quality solid-state cap. I wasn't keen on replacing all the secondary caps too.

I also checked the PSU over while it was apart and it actually looked brand new