Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

Ask Slashdot: What's Your Worst Damaged Hardware Horror Story? 301

"Everyone has that story," writes Slashdot reader alaskana98: You know, the one where you spilled a Big Gulp-sized cup of sugary Coke all over your laptop and it somehow still works to this day — although the space bar is permanently glued in place.

Or that time you left your iPhone out in a pouring thunderstorm, stuck it in a bag of rice and after a few days it miraculously turned back on. Yes, we've all been there, maybe cried a little and then went on with life — a little wiser for the wear.

So, fellow Slashdotters, what's your worst tale of hardware horrors?

The original submission has already drawn some interesting tales from long-time Slashdot readers, including two thunderstorm hardware horror stories. And there's also the user who remembers how "In the mid 1980s I blew up a $75,000 laser by not turning the cooling water on before firing it up."

But what's your story? Share your own tale in the comments.

What's your worst damaged hardware horror story?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Ask Slashdot: What's Your Worst Damaged Hardware Horror Story?

Comments Filter:
  • Lightning strike in the backyard took out our microwave oven and our garage door opener, as well as two neighbors' garage door openers.

  • by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:13PM (#61262338)

    At one point in the 90s, the mom and pop I worked for then had landed a lucrative contract with a local steel processing company, who had a quality control laboratory placed in very very close proximity to an electrochemical pickling treatment system.

    Such systems are used to strip off oxides, greases, and other unwanted contaminants from the surfaces of steel products prior to distilled water cleaning and then other surface treatments (like chem film). They are essentially hydrochloric acid tanks hooked up to high voltage. They naturally, produce *A LOT* of free chlorine radicals in vapor/mist form.

    The geniuses that designed their building put the quality control lab literally right next to these systems. Without ducting outside air.

    About ever month, we would have to replace all the computer equipment in their labs, because of the corrosive atmosphere being ducted right into that lab. It would transform the chasis of computer enclosures into 100% rust, and would destroy sensitive surface mount components on system boards, along with the traces themselves where it could get under the solder resist.

    Imagine being able to take a pinch of motherboard, rub it between your fingers, and it crumbling into oxide powder.

    That's what the entire computer fleet in that lab would turn into after a month.

    I suggested to their maintenance dept several times on the calls I serviced at the site, that they needed to duct outside air, and have positive pressure ventilation for that lab. I still don't know if they ever did that.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @02:54AM (#61262714) Homepage Journal

      Long ago when I used to fix computers I had one come in from a garage. Whole thing was coated in black soot, inside and out. Some kind of mixture of exhaust fumes, tyre dust, road dust, engine smootz, oil and grease.

      The machine had died and they were in a panic because their entire operation was relying on it to manage customer bookings and print out invoices/receipts on a dot matrix printer with special tractor feed paper. First thought was to just give them a new machine, but it was running DOS and DOS wouldn't run properly on most motherboards of that era, and even if it did they needed a parallel port for the printer and most machines were legacy-free.

      We eventually found something old enough to just about work. They enquired about a backup system but there wasn't much available for DOS, certainly nothing simple enough for the grease monkeys to use.

      • Similar story with a small doctor's office that used a special dumb terminal attached to an AS/400 server.

        Rather than hang the printer on the AS/400 itself, it was hung on the dumb terminal. Needless to say, the dumb terminal failed, nobody at the practice knew the admin credentials for the AS/400, and they had electronic patient records they desperately needed access to.

        I left my employer at the time, but i rained documentation and prices for an IBM twinax to Centronics adapter, and documentation on how t

      • We eventually found something old enough to just about work. They enquired about a backup system but there wasn't much available for DOS, certainly nothing simple enough for the grease monkeys to use.

        You can still buy brand spanking new 386s. They are ISA passive backplane SBCs or PC104 SBCs, but they are real 386s. Just google "386 SBC". The passive backplane types can even still be used with one's ancient expansion cards. (There are PC104 to ISA adapter boards, too.)

    • Yup, chlorine pretty well eats anything.
      We supported printers in a an abattoir for a while, noticed one in particular where the chassis was rotting... came to find they chlorine fogged the room periodically to kill any anthrax spores....
      The other ones were kept in meat processing rooms at 0C (32F) and after 4 years or so, weâ(TM)re just chucked out as the rust build up inside was something to behold, it was kinda cool to watch an A3 sheet come out in a whoosh of steam due the temperature difference tho

  • by rossz ( 67331 ) <ogreNO@SPAMgeekbiker.net> on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:13PM (#61262342) Journal

    I had scrapped and saved to have enough to build a new computer. Finally had enough and bought the new motherboard, memory, CPU, etc. When I was attaching the heatsink to the CPU, I somehow screwed it up and cracked the CPU. Now I had all the parts for a new computer except for that all important CPU which I could not afford at the moment. I had to wait a couple of weeks to get it.

    These days I don't build my own systems. I make enough now to pay people to do it for me. I still pick and choose what goes into it, but I don't bother with the grunt work.

    • by johnw ( 3725 )

      The very first time I built my own computer from bits the man in the shop said he'd do the actual installation of the CPU in the motherboard to make sure the settings were right. (This was in the days before CPUs needed heatsinks.)

      I did all the rest and the computer worked fine for about 6 months, then became unreliable. Having replaced most things I came to the conclusion that the fault lay in the CPU and so ordered a new one. When I went to install it I discovered the problem - he'd set the voltage jum

  • hard drive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:13PM (#61262344)
    One of the mainframe guys I used to work with in the late 90's had a photo of one of the platters from the hard disk embedded in the server room wall, this was one of those early IBM beasts with 24 inch platters that had a catastrophic failure.
    • Re:hard drive (Score:4, Interesting)

      by John_Sauter ( 595980 ) <John_Sauter@systemeyescomputerstore.com> on Monday April 12, 2021 @12:40AM (#61262474) Homepage

      One of the mainframe guys I used to work with in the late 90's had a photo of one of the platters from the hard disk embedded in the server room wall, this was one of those early IBM beasts with 24 inch platters that had a catastrophic failure.

      I suspect that was a very old photograph, because I heard a similar story in the 1960s. The drive was the IBM 1301, a very large disk drive. According to the story, if a head crashed in the outer track, it provided enough torque to snap the arm holding the head and hurl it out of the drive with enough force to beak the class door and embed itself in the wall. We ran out two IBM 1301s close to the wall and facing it, so if something like that happened only the wall would be damaged.

      • It was an old photo, don't remember the date on it, but he was just about to retire in 96/97 when I saw it.
      • by catsidhe ( 454589 ) <catsidhe@@@gmail...com> on Monday April 12, 2021 @03:10AM (#61262736) Homepage

        I heard a story many years ago of a tech who went to investigate a cascading failure in a row of washing machine hard drives. A single platter had failed, which damaged the head. They thought maybe it was just the pack which was faulty, so they put in a new pack, and destroyed that as well. So they thought maybe it was the drive which was failing, so they put the first failed pack in another drive, and destroyed the head on that as well. Their attempts to figure out what was wrong ended up killing three or four disk packs and as many drives.

        When the tech turned up, he ran his finger around the inside of the mouth of the drive, and his finger came out covered in red dust.
        "What's that?" the customer asked.
        "Data," he replied.

  • by Gription ( 1006467 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:23PM (#61262366)
    We had 8 field trainers and in one year they destroyed 5 laptops by dumping drinks in them. It is pretty obvious that if you put an open drink next to a computer when a person turns around that the sweep of their arms will tend to push drinks into the computer.
    I sent out an email saying that open drinks are not allowed near company computers.

    The 'affront' of being told not to do something traveled up the food chain until the Director of Marketing showed up at my desk wanting to know why I would send out such an "offensive email" and it was obvious she was there for my butt. I explained that in the last calendar year we had to replace over $8000 in laptops from the negligence of her trainers. She turned right around and then sent out an email to the trainers telling them that open drinks are not allowed near a computer.
    • by Ed_1024 ( 744566 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @02:43AM (#61262704)

      Virtually brand new fully loaded MBP. Sitting down at home with a pint of beer doing some work and the inevitable happened. Turned it off as quickly as possible, washed it with de-ionised water, dried it out with a hair dryer.

      First power up - nothing. Shit. Left it for a day. Next power up got a chime but no screen. Hmmm. Connected to a TV via HDMI port and desktop appears. Whoopee! But not very portable now as plugged into 75inch TV.

      After a couple of hours, there was a flicker or two from the screen and voila, it was back! Worked perfectly ever since, apart from a very faint whiff of hops to start with when it got hot enough for the fans to come on...

      • by KGIII ( 973947 )

        I had a laptop that drank almost as much beer as I did. (That's a bit of an exaggeration.)

        The thing was magical, however. Every time it drank a beer, it only killed the keyboard. I replaced the keyboard in it so many times (it went through four or five) that I had the process down to under 15 minutes to replace it - on a laptop that went together like a 3D puzzle. I have no idea why it only killed the keyboard and nothing else, as it sure consumed a lot of beer.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by danger zone ( 2172 )

      We had 8 field trainers and in one year they destroyed 5 laptops by dumping drinks in them. It is pretty obvious that if you put an open drink next to a computer when a person turns around that the sweep of their arms will tend to push drinks into the computer.

      I sent out an email saying that open drinks are not allowed near company computers.

      The 'affront' of being told not to do something traveled up the food chain until the Director of Marketing showed up at my desk wanting to know why I would send out such an "offensive email" and it was obvious she was there for my butt. I explained that in the last calendar year we had to replace over $8000 in laptops from the negligence of her trainers. She turned right around and then sent out an email to the trainers telling them that open drinks are not allowed near a computer.

      To this day, that's the reason I still use only notebooks that have keyboard water drains (business class thinkpads, among others).

  • by dendad51 ( 6204576 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:26PM (#61262378)
    Years ago, we were involved in testing a customer's one and only prototype board. (I cannot remember its desired function now). I was not actually included in the testing but thought I'd "help". My work mate was looking for a problem so, even though he had not asked, I had to put my ore in and so, taking up his multi meter, went to measure the 240VAC mains input voltage. But I failed to check the meter and he had last used it to measure on the 10A range! After the flash, when I could see again, there was the board with quite a few tracks blown off the board. Fortunately for me, after a lot of work replacing destroyed traces and parts, I got it going again.
  • The fire computer (Score:4, Interesting)

    by memory_register ( 6248354 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:29PM (#61262384)
    Not sure if this counts, but I had a friend in high school who had lived through a home fire - twice. First time was faulty wiring, second time was a grass fire in the neighbor's property that got out of control.

    He had an old Gateway 2000 desktop with massive burn marks down one side of the case that was in both fires and the damn thing still ran. We laughed every time he turned it on, like we were waiting for it to spontaneously explode or something.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Once I did an insurance report for a computer that had been flown in from the United Arab Emirates. The guy checked it in on his flight and when it came out the other end it had gone from a normal computer tower shape to some kind of abstract sculpture, kind of like a Picasso painting in 3D. It was one of those all-metal Lian Li cases so no plastic to shatter, it was just massively deformed.

      Managed to get most of his data off the HDD but the rest was a write-off. The insurance company kept bugging us to see

  • by Randseed ( 132501 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:35PM (#61262392)
    I once saw someone find a seemingly lost thumb drive on a table and look around, then pick it up and pocket it. A few minutes later there was a lot of commotion in the other room about twenty feet away. The guy had plugged it into a laptop, which was now billowing grey smoke out of the side vent port. I surmised it was a USB killer.
    • Re:USB Killer (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @04:17AM (#61262828) Homepage Journal

      Older laptops sometimes had very poor USB implementations that could die if they were shorted out, especially if the short was between 5V and the data pins (which are 3.3V maximum).

      I think the spec says that all pins should be 5V tolerant and the supply limited to 500mA, but of course back in the USB 2.0 era a lot of crappy hardware didn't bother. I've seen machines that had no current limit on the 5V line at all, so a short would dump a few amps into the controller chip.

    • The opposite... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @08:39AM (#61263272) Homepage

      My boss had the opposite experience. He was into weird ergonomic keyboards (the company was a bit related to text entry, so it was both personal and professional interest), so he had some interesting ~$200 devices, IIRC his favourite one did not have any labels on the keys, so you HAD to touch type. He was also a big Apple fan and had bought the new Mac Mini of the time (~10 years ago). One day, his fancy keyboard stopped working. He tried another fancy keyboard, nothing, then a third and a fourth, which was all he had there. That's when he involved other people, we tried the keyboards on a windows machine and they were dead. Obviously the USB was killing them, which was quite unusual for a 6-month old Mac Mini, and he was out of luck I guess about the expensive keyboards.
      He went to the Apple store (NYC), they told him they would replace the board and he would have it in 2 weeks. In two weeks he went back and they told him they had invalidated the warranty because they found "dust inside". This was a new Mac from a non-smoking, no cat etc office, where we've been using computers for years. They told him they were willing to get him 10% off a new device. So he just buys a new MacBook Pro. He comes back and tells me what happened, my jaw drops as I try to explain it's impossible for them to invalidate the warranty for dust - especially when they are the ones deciding whether to install dust filters or not, which is why it's not in their TOS, but he tells me the Apple genius said so, so that's how it must be. The next day I see him with a new Apple Cinema display, I ask him what happened to his 6 month old nice Dell monitor? Apparently the new Mac could not connect to it (I've forgotten why, but it was some matter of dual link dvi or something?), so he went to the Apple store and they told him it won't work with that monitor, he had to buy a Cinema Display....
      So, yeah, I call it the "capitalist USB". Cost lots of money, made some great sales for Apple.

  • by m2pc ( 546641 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:39PM (#61262398)
    Years ago I was managing a Windows server for a [very small] startup I was working for .... the server was co-located in a data center about 20 miles away (we had absolutely no support from the NOC, other than verifying our IDs and escorting us to our server, but hey, the price was right!). While troubleshooting a network issue remotely over RDP, I thought to myself, "OK so I'll just disable the network interface and re-enab..." suddenly to realize the only recourse was to drive 20 miles, go through several security checks, wheel over a KVM cart to our cage and connect it to our server to manually re-enable the now disabled network card. Talk about a waste of time! We quickly learned to have multiple NICs and an IP KVM we could utilize if needed. Not one of my finer moments either!
    • by Ubi_NL ( 313657 ) <joris.benschopNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday April 12, 2021 @01:29AM (#61262552) Journal

      Yeah, back in the late nineties I was logged into a linux server at a similar NOC some 100km away. After finishing, I shut down my workstation with "shutdown -h now", not realizing I was still in an SSH session to the remote box. Which was running 600 websites. At sunday night. I realized the situation after I noticed the workstation took an awful long time to shut down.

    • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @02:05AM (#61262618) Homepage Journal

      That was easy to do back in the old days before IPMI. After fat fingering the new IP address on a Linux box, I learned to always set a restart 10 minutes from now, then make the change live. If it worked OK, cancel the restart and CAREFULLY change the configuration files. Have someone else double check that the config files match the current running config.

      Serial console was much better, but the lack of power cycle could sometimes be a real problem. I saw a few setups where one machine had a digital I/O board hooked up the the other machine's reset buttons.

      Once IPMI got more or less reliable, things got nicer. Then Intel had to fsck it up with the management engine :-(

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That's the kind of thing that the much-hated Intel Management Engine is supposed to solve. Even if the machine is "off" you can still connect to the Intel ME, power it up, view the screen via VNC even in the BIOS etc.

      Unfortunately thanks to Intel's competence so can everyone else...

  • by babanada ( 977344 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:49PM (#61262408)
    I was selling PCs. We had CP/M and MS-DOS machines (a lonely 68000 workstation... forget the name... fancy... can't remember... story goes that most of the boards were run without cases where they were manufactured). I was vacuuming the showroom and plugged the vacuum into the back of an IBM PC XT. Back then, with the version we had, at least, the monitor plugged in to a regular plug. I plugged the vacuum in and blew an internal fuse in the PC. Quite embarrassing. My boss, incredulously, "You plugged the vacuum into it???!!". I took it apart and found the fuse, so it wasn't horrible, but on the scale of stupid in the damaged hardware horror story, it ranks up there.
    • I've never seen one with a regular NEMA outlet on it. Every daisy chain power supply I've ever seen had a C13 and a C14. To connect the monitor, you needed an IEC extension cable.

      I miss those days a little bit. Your PC turned on and off with a big switch that gave a heavy thunk, and your monitor turned on and off with it. After that era ended, it took a surprising number of years before monitors got smart enough to simulate that automatic power control function properly. I knew a guy who smoked indoors

  • by ArghBlarg ( 79067 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:51PM (#61262412) Homepage

    Our cat (now deceased) who had a bad habit of marking profusely did the deed all over the Ensoniq Mirage I was storing for a bandmate in our basement. Didn't find out for a few days...

    Man, scrubbing circuit boards and dissembled key contacts is bad enough, but semi-dried catp*ss... phew! The board was 100% afterwards though. They were built like tanks.

    • by sjames ( 1099 )

      That sounds like a friend's VCR. His cat hacked up a hairball right over the case vents. The cleaning process was no fun. We had to patch up a couple circuit traces that were damaged as well, but it worked fine after that.

  • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:52PM (#61262416)

    I was working at a game studio on a PS1 game in the mid 90's. Now there was no standalone PS1 dev kits. Instead the PS1 dev card was actually two ISA daughterboard cards [twitter.com] -- that housed the PS1 -- and plugged into a PC. (The standalone blue PS1's were the debug kits.)

    Now Sony in their infinite wisdom had the same 9-pin D-sub connector as the EGA monitor output AND the gamepad input ports on the back of this PS1 dev card. You can probably see where this is going ...

    A co-worker and I were tasked with setting up a few new PCs with the PS1 dev cards. We plugged in the gamepad, hooked the EGA monitor up, fired it up, and nothing. Puzzled we powered the computer off, pulled the card out, swapped in a new one, hooked it back up, hit the power and again nothing.

    A few seconds later one of us asked "What's that smell?"

    We quickly turned the power off and then realized why the two cards weren't working. We had accidently plugged the gamepad input into the EGA monitor out connector and the EGA cable into the gamepad input connector due to the shitty design of both the OUTPUT and INPUT ports having the same pin count and gender!

    We told management that "Uh, two of the dev cards we got aren't working". We also sent an email out saying "Please be extremely careful hooking up the PS1 dev kits."

    Last we heard was that it cost the company $20K. We were never sure if that was each or total and we didn't dare find out.

    We never did tell anyone what happened about those two "mysterious" PS1 dev cards. ;-)

    A few years later when I was doing PS2 game development I noticed that the PS2 dev kit "TOOL" had the gamepad input (9-pin D-sub) and monitor connector (15-pin D-sub) be a different pinout and gender. I always wonder how many PS1 dev cards Sony got back due to their bone headed decision to make it extremely easy to accidently hook up. I guess they must have paid attention and fixed it with the PS2 dev kit.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      A friend blew up his PC and two HDDs full of work. His PSU died and it was a module one, so he went and bought another modular one, plugged everything in... And it turns out the new one used a different pin-out with 12V on the old 5V line and some of the grounds.

      I've also seen a few IDE devices where someone has forced the cable in upside down. The cables are supposed to have tabs and one blocked off hole, but some cables didn't have the tab part. With a bit of force the pin that is supposed to be missing o

      • PSU pin out different than the standard was part for the course by Dell, up to roughly 2006 I think. We got old PCs cheaply or for free when broken, and some of us found out the hard way. Of course only on newly bought PSU, mixing and matching from same generation parts from Dell was fine.
  • About 3 months into my first job as an engineer at McDonnell Douglas I was probing a power supply in an AV-8B Stores Management Computer (the one that controls weapon delivery). I was using a pig-sticker (just a wooden stick with a metal pin in the end that a clip from a multimeter could clip to) to get a measurement. I accidentally tilted the stick so that it shorted a couple of points. A large capacitor caught fire. The fire was being fed by burning metal so was very hot. It was also coming out of a small hole in the top that was focusing it into the shape of a blowtorch flame. The torch burned a hole through several boards and a wiring bundle. The cost of the repair was just over $30K (in 1986 dollars).

    Luckily, it wasn't the worst f-up of the week. Another engineer managed to drop a $250K HUD onto a concrete floor (not exactly good for the delicate optics).

    • Your tax dollars at work.

    • My dad talked about a couple incidents where he worked somewhat similar.

      This one was an intentional test. During development of the F-35 they were doing robustness testing of the main battery, by dropping a conductive bar of metal across the battery connections. The bar of metal welded itself to the battery terminals and it was more than a couple days before the battery was cool enough to handle. After detaching the bar the battery charged up and worked just fine, after which they promptly disposed of th

  • Computer repair (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drkshadow ( 6277460 ) on Sunday April 11, 2021 @11:58PM (#61262426)

    There was a customer who brought his computer in for some type of service. Probably a dead hard drive .... and probably because the hard drive was so caked in fuzzy, insulating tobacco tar that it over heated and died prematurely.

    Inside? Tobacco bunnies all over the bottom of the case.
    Between the drives? Tobacco.
    The heat sink? It was one fuzzy blob of tobacco tar. The fan? It spun, though a bit slowly.
    The machine was clearly thermal-throttling to oblivion, but the user's only concern was the hard drive. There was only so much (little) extra that vacuuming it out would achieve.

    This computer reeked of cancer. When it came in, somehow I got the job of "fixing" it. So I did. It was open for as little time as possible. I wore latex gloves whenever I had to go near it. It made the whole damn lab reek of a rank ash tray. Not wet -- that's a far more ashy smell -- not dry, but tar-ry.

    Once I was done, I slid a tight-fitting trash bag down over the top. Partly to help seal in the smell. (Not a single person in the place complained of my suggestion, not the secretary who gave it back to him when he came to pick it up, not even the small business owner that had to deal with my antics. Unfortunately I wasn't present when he came to get it to have been able to give him the stank-eye.) Honestly, partly it was to provide a little bit easier of a disposal option for the customer: this computer was toxic, noxious waste, and it needed to be dropped into the nearest dumpster. Preferably triple-bagged. Whether or not it had all RoHS components, it was toxic waste.

    • by SIGBUS ( 8236 )

      You're not the only one to notice how smoking and cooling fans are a bad mix. Back before the pandemic, my lifetime-smoker sister came to me thinking that her laptop had a virus on it. We fire it up, and the fan is sounding like a jet taking off. I went through it and found no trace of malware. At this point, I opened it up, and found it was just choked with tobacco fuzz. After cleaning that out, the laptop ran a lot better, for some reason.

      I'm just glad she didn't run a heavy-duty gaming rig in a high-airf

  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @12:02AM (#61262432) Homepage
    A long time ago, in a distant--err, before USB was popular, I used to use PATA hard drive caddies to back up my personal system. The caddies were like those used still in many data firms. Anyway, being short on money, I only had a few drives. I shut down my computer, slid a drive caddy in to the bay in the computer to do a backup. I turned on the computer--and heard the fire-cracker-like snap of exploding Chinese capacitors!

    Aghast, I opened up the computer, and smelled the acrid stench of the burning money. Several of the capacitors on the power supply for the motherboard had exploded, spraying their electrolyte from their split can lids. Something else was wrong. I pulled the drive from the bay. There were components on the drive bay. A transistor was smoked. I pulled the drive from the caddy.

    I built a new computer system. Setting my backup drive aside, I installed the old system drive as my secondary. After a reinstall, I did a drive check on the main system disk. It was corrupt! I tried the backup drive. It was completely dead!

    Eventually, I was able to copy folders across, but on my old main drive, track-0 was physically damaged, preventing its reuse. In the end, I just barely kept my data. I didn't lose anything but money and time. My data was safe. So, the moral is: add hardware abstraction in the backup chain.
  • The $125K CCD camera (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KingRygel ( 398150 ) <geychanerNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday April 12, 2021 @12:02AM (#61262436) Homepage
    Not me, but my boss. Once upon a time, more than 25 years ago, I was working at a solar observatory. I was doing evening and morning work measuring Earthshine with a simple refractor (a disused solar full disk system) piggybacked on the main telescope. The CCD camera was a state-of-the-art $125K camera on loan from Palomar Observatory. During initial setup and trials, my boss at the time (the Director) was unhappy that it might take some time to get the system aligned the first night, so he decided to align it during the day, opening the system to full sunlight with no IR or UV blockers. He couldn't get an image, and left in a huff. We removed the camera, and found that the CCD was (as we suspected) shattered into tiny fragments. We were, not surprisingly, unable to get another camera loaned to us from Palomar, and used a good, but decidedly inferior, CCD camera that was on the solar telescope, forcing us to swap it from one instrument to the other and back each night for the next 2 years.
  • While driving home from college one day at triple-digit speeds, my rear wheels locked and a cloud went up behind me. Putting it in neutral, I managed to coast it to the shoulder of the road and didn't bother to even look under the hood before flagging a ride the rest of the way to town. I just knew I'd blown another engine.

    The next day I went back with a tow truck to get the car. When we popped the hood, the first thing we noticed was that all we smelled was coolant - no oil. Then we noticed a puddle of coo

  • Electrocuted a Cow (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seoras ( 147590 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @12:19AM (#61262450)

    I grew up on a farm and the weekends of my youth invariably involved working on the farm for my father.
    One Sunday I had to hook up a trailer to take waste out to be burned in one of our fields.
    The tractor I was driving had a front end loader [deere.com], the bucket wasn't fitted it was just the arms.
    So I'm looking backwards over my shoulder reversing in to the trailer to hook it on when I hear a loud bang.
    Because I hadn't been paying attention to the front of the tractor I hadn't noticed that the FEL arm had swung under the tension wire supporting the electricity power pole in the middle of the yard (yeah stupid place for it).
    I had pulled the whole pole over towards me and the power lines had snapped.
    Unfortunately for one of our cows it was scratching its arse against a metal gate where the power lines landed and got blown away.
    It was on it's back with its leg twitching in the air. I thought it was well cooked and I was in shit with dad.
    However after 10mins it was up and off munching grass as if nothing had happened. Tough animals, cows.
    The major damage was that I blew out the power grid for all of East Kilbride [wikipedia.org] on a Sunday afternoon.
    The power company guys weren't pleased about their Sunday call out, or the angry phone calls about spoiled Sunday roast dinners, but my father was pleased because they not only reconnected it but moved the pole to a more sensible location where it wasn't in our way anymore.
     

  • To make a long story short, I once had to take a hammer to a PowerBook’s casing to literally beat it back into shape after a fall left it in bad shape. I still keep that PowerBook around to this day, since it was the highest-end PowerBook ever produced that could still natively run Classic apps, making it the perfect machine for playing all of those great, classic, Mac games that never made the jump to OS X or Intel (insert a well-deserved joke here about Mac gaming).

    Seriously though, I still bust it

  • by Q-Hack! ( 37846 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @01:12AM (#61262504)

    Back in the AMD K6 days, I was one of the early watercooling moders. I took the square bit off of a sewage cleanout plug and trimmed it off with a Dremel to fit, then glued it snugly over the top of the CPU. Added a couple of hose barbs, a heater core out of some late model vehicle, and was off and running. One day I noticed some algae growing in the clear tubing. So... I added some bleach to kill the algae. It was shortly thereafter that I learned that bleach eats aluminum... what the top of the CPU was made out of.

  • I worked in a lab with a lot of inherited energized superconducting magnets, operating in a persistent state (think of MRI magnets, but smaller). We had to move one of them, which required powering it down. Powering down a magnet like this requires special steps to gradually reduce current. We knew what the current was in the magnet, but not the polarity because no one had bothered to record it. So, flipped a coin to guess. Guessed wrong and quenched the magnet, huge plume of helium vapor, probably a few th
  • Worked in a place where there were a lot of green types. Did not like the aircon to be on in the server room, so switched it off and opened the windows because, Hey! It's winter! We can save power!. The temp dropped quite low and the water in the lead acid batteries in the APC UPS froze, cracking them. When I walked into the server room it was freezing and smelled of acid fumes.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12, 2021 @02:13AM (#61262644)

      It's still not long ago or far enough away to post under a username, but, in some small central European country just before the dot-com boom:

      Guy is installing UPS batteries for one of our machine rooms. It's a big block of batteries and he's got them all charged up and now has to measure the voltage over them. So he puts a ladder over the top of the battery rack and goes over the battery terminals measuring. Unfortunately, as he's getting down, he knocks the ladder which shorts the entire battery rack.

      Being an actual solid ladder, rather than evaporating, as your normal power cable would, it manages to carry the entire current of the short circuit, but starts glowing red. Guy is lucky as hell because he has the presence of mind to kick the ladder which breaks in half breaking the circuit before the entire battery rack explodes. The photos of the room afterward are a shock.

  • by tigersha ( 151319 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @01:24AM (#61262534) Homepage

    If you do a shutdown -h now, you make sure you are on YOUR laptop, and not via SSH on the SERVER. And don't do this on Christmas day. Especially not while you are doing a quick 5 minute check if everything is still running during the evening and the server is 20 miles away. And you car is broke. And it is snowing outside as if there is not tomorrow.

  • by sabri ( 584428 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @01:25AM (#61262538)
    It was the year 2018. Somewhere in China, a virus was plotting its way out of a bat - or a lab, historians are still unsure.

    I had an iPhone 6+, which was a hand-me-down from a friend who I always helped with their IT. My daughter was now using it (without sim card) as a glorified ipad. Its battery life sucked, so I bought a replacement kit on eBay.

    This wasn't the first time I'd be replacing a battery. I replaced batteries on my own iPhone 6, my wife's iPhone 7, and an iPad mini. It almost became routine. Open up the housing by unscrewing the two screws next to the charging port, and prying it open using the suction-cup pliers I once received with a screen replacement. So far so good. Unplug the battery from the mainboard, heat up the glue with a blow-dryer, and pry it loose from the chassis.

    In the past, I had used a plastic tool for this. But somehow, I lost it. So this time, I used a metal prying tool. Big mistake. Huge mistake.

    Somehow, I damaged one or more cells of the Lithium-Ion battery, and it started hissing and burning. I was on the top floor of a three story townhome. Holy shit, what do I do? I grabbed a pair of pliers to hold it by a corner, and as it was burning I ran down 4 flights of stairs towards the front door. Halfway there, the fire alarm started going off. I finally made it, and threw the phone in the grass, and waited for it to finish burning.

    Miraculously, none of the other components were damaged. The damaged cells were on the outside end of the battery. I was able to pry the whole thing loose and take it out, and cleaned the phone. Then, I took the new battery and connected it, to see if it would turn on.

    It did. I patched the phone back up, and it was used for another year.
  • I was trying to overclock an AMD K6-based computer in the 1990s.. in my hurry, I tried plugging in PS2 Keyboard (was it an AT connector? Might have been) as I powered up, but the plugging happened after power. Puff, magic smoke came out and the board never worked again. Really felt foolish, and even today when I plug in these Thunderbolt or other connectors into running machines I have a small bit of concern, sometimes. We have come a long way.
  • I had just received an extremely expensive brand new DEC Windows NT server with 2 CPUs and 128 MB RAM. It was 1995 and the vendor demonstrated this fancy RAID setup which would improve reliability. I asked him "So I can just pull out any of those drives while the system is running??" to which the vendor said "Go ahead!"

    Surely, once I pulled that drive out of the bay, the RAID set failed immediately and we had to wait for a new hard drive to be flown in from Germany. That was a tough lesson.

  • Part of the power supply turned red hot, fell off, and was flicked out of the case by the fan and onto a pile of papers behind her computer. Luckily we were home when it happened and went to investigate the noise. I am fairly certain after taking it apart the failed component was a thermal sensor for the power supply ...

  • You just pop out the battery, and rinse it in the shower, and let it dry for a day or so. Assuming you are fast enough and nothing short-cutted first, or you have a ThinkPad or other laptop that has spill resistant keyboard to begin with.

  • Appatently I fried a $50k camera once in early 2000s. The beast had a 30 megapixel chip back then, about the size of my palm. It was one of few custom-made devices for a very specific purpose. Slow as hell, reading out a picture took almost a minute (didn't have to, but the hardware manufacturer was peculiar).

    The idea was that camera timing should be very deterministic so you could calculate various events. I had to write a Linux / RTAI driver for it, and somehow it magically broke while in my possession. T

  • Back in the early 80’s I was working on DTS computer based cash registers, very expensive units that were amongst the first to do barcode scanning. I was away in the country, and had a spare unit in the back of the Datsun Sunny station wagon. When I took off rather quickly, it flew out of the back of the wagon,and hit the road, as the tailgate wasn’t closed properly. Broke all the plastic mounting studs inside. I superglued them up, and put it back in the store when I got back. Luckily, it was n

  • As a child I won a MITS LED calculator kit as a door prize at an Altar 8800 seminar. Assembled it and was quite happy with it, although it ate batteries (6xAA batteries in the back of the case assessable by removing 4 screws). Unfortunately my sister borrowed the calculator, then visited grandma, who then gave her a half dozen wet cucumbers which said sister stashed in her purse with the calculator. The electrolytic corrosion of the PCB traces was total as the 6 AA batteries discharged through the wet calc

  • In the early 2000-s I worked at a company that managed railroad communications. We used fiber optics cable suspended on poles that were also used for overhead electric wires (it is an electrified railroad and not in the US). And one day a train car caught fire and burned away everything around it, including our cables.

    But the miraculous thing is that the fiber optic core (a millimiter-sized glass strand) survived the fire and carried traffic without any issues for more than a day until the repair equipmen
  • I was developing a pan/tilt system. I was ready to do a first test, to check if the motor moved at all, so I issued a tilt command. And it worked! I saw the thing tilt, and then I noticed the screwdriver I left on top. I saw everything happen in slow motion... the screwdriver rolled off the plate, fell down, and plunged itself straight into the motor controller. There, it caused a short circuit that destroyed our only prototype. It took a couple of weeks to repair, as we were using a COTS driver module that
    • Re:Bad day at work (Score:4, Interesting)

      by LatencyKills ( 1213908 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @07:22AM (#61263094)
      I've got this beat. I was working on the Space Shuttle program, part of the team that measured the exhaust plume chemical constituents using LIDAR, and I had a large tracking mirror. It had a tendency to develop a slow DC offset in the servos which would cause the mirror to move without any control input, so just before launch I would zero out all the circuits using trimpots inside the control box just before launch. One day, couldn't find the trimpot tool, so I grabbed a normal screwdriver. While adjusting the trimpot, the screwdriver got away from me and fell into the box. Flash of light, smell of burned components, front panel goes dark. Launch in 30 minutes - not good. Furiously pull out schematics and burned boards, figure it out, run to Radio Shack in Ft. Walton Beach. They don't have the exact parts I need, but I buy a bag of stuff that's close and run back. I solder up a new board (we had some blank boards and wire in the trailer we were stationed in). It was too big to fit into the box - had to strap it on top like the modified Delorean in BTTF2. 2 minutes before launch, flip it on and get green lights. Success!
  • Early 2000s. Had these 2 same Western Digital "Caviar" HD at home, mirrored. The summer, that year, was particularly hot. One disk failed. So I have some time to buy another one and re-mirror, right? The next day, the other one fails as well :( From that time, bought Seagate HDs only...
  • by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @02:37AM (#61262688)
    I was managing a small technology operations team - 44 staff and a couple of mid-range machines, along with sundry networking and LAN server equipment. Our "Data Center" was a good-sized room - maybe 40 feet by 60 feet - in the basement of our main building.

    The first event happened during a year of major refurbishment to the site. I came in to work one morning to find the door to the "Data Center" pegged open [which was against my instructions, since the room ran on positive pressure to help the aircon], but when I looked inside I could see two of my duty operators clambering over a set of 3480 tape drives. One was positioning a bucket on the top of the tape drive unit to catch an impressive spout of water that was emerging between two ceiling tiles; the other had an A-frame ladder and was trying to remove a tile a few feet distant, in the hope they could see what was happening in the ceiling void.

    It turns out that part of the building work had resulted in a *huge* pool of water forming on the roof which had then managed to find a way in to the building, had run down the inside of one of many of the interior partition walls until it reached the ceiling to the computer room. At which point it had just come flooding through. Cost us a pair of double-hopper 3480 tape decks, which somehow we got replaced on insurance, despite it almost certainly being contractor negligence...

    Second incident was in the same room a couple of years later... More building work, this time an extension was being built on to the building. The original "end" of the building was demolished, turning the far side of the long wall of the computer room into a temporarily "outside wall". The contractors were digging out the footings at the time. More massive rain, which flooded the construction area enough to stop work. What we didn't know at the time was that when they had been removing the unwanted part of the building adjacent to the computer room, they had managed to dislodge a single brick from the wall... at the exact level of our false floor, which was about 6 inches deep and which housed all the mains and data cables for our kit: 2 mid-range servers, 4x3480 tape units, 2xopen reel tape units, 2x1,200lpm impact printers, multiple racks of Netware and Windows servers, one large comms rack...

    I came in to the room to find one of my tekkies with a floor tile lifter and tile, looking in to the floor void. Not expecting any work to be happening in the floor, I asked if we had a problem... "Yup!" Four inches of dirty water, in a void full of 3-phase power. We had a major "Distribution Panel" for our electrical feed with two of what we called our "Hammer, House of Horror" switches - in that it would be "Horror" for us if we ever had to use them in anger. First and only time I used them.

    But with metal-framed gear, an aluminum floor, dirty water and a lot of cables...
  • 1. I left out my 5.25" Apple 2 floppy disks on my friend's backyard wall and its sprinklers came on. Some disks died from the water damage. :(

    2. I accidently fried my running quad core PC after letting one of its case fan's cut power cable touch the PSU. :(

    3. As a newbie in my brand new custom built 486 DX2/66 PC, Norton Utilities v8.0 (DOS)'s Disk Defragger hosed my HDD's datas due to its VERIFY=ON bug. :(

  • Ask Octave Klaba, head of OVH... (and search the news if you have no clue of why that's on topic!)
  • by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @02:59AM (#61262720)
    I once fried a hard drive that I had to go to great pains to recover. I installed a removable drive caddy in a PC I was rebuilding. The PC also had a modular power supply. Get everything built and put the drive in and sparks as soon as the connectors touched. WTF. Bad hot swap tray? I grab an old drive that I wasn't using and toss it in. Same thing. I pull the molex off of the hot swap backplane and check voltages. The pinouts are all wrong. Again WTF? So start tracing the power cable back to the PSU to try to check voltages there. Only it doesn't go back to the PSU. Turns out when routing the cables, I mixed up the end of the SATA/Molex run with the end of the motherboard EPS cable, which of course used the same damn connector. So the MB was pushing out power over the cable, but with the 12v on the 5v pin and the 12v and one of the common pins swapped. I ended up having to buy a new board for the drive and (because modern drives are extra fun) swapping out a chip from the old board that was thankfully not fried that contained layout data specific to the drive.

    I also have had 2 separate power supplied try to burn my face off. Both times trying to troubleshoot a no-start and at some point I put my face around back by the fan to see if it was spinning right when they decided to shoot flames out the back. You would figure I'd have learned the first time. Ah well. Now if I want to check if a fan is spinning and I can't see it I use the end of a small zip tie.

    Then there was the time I accidentally shot my monitor, but we don't talk about that one.
  • Back in the 80s I was a technician at a laser company. One of the engineers was installing the ruby rod into a very expensive unit. It as a 5/8" diameter ruby rod. When he tightened down the bracket the rod split the long way. Because he had used a 1/2" bracket. Each ruby rod cost between $10k and $20k in 1980 money, so roughly $30k to $60k in today's money.

    We gave him a special award to commemorate the auspicious occasion.

  • There's nothing quite like the light show you get from spilling your soft drink onto a vacuum-tube audio amplifier. Did that one when I was a wee lad and such amplifiers were the norm.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I built a monitoring system to keep an eye out for upcoming failures on our bucket wheel excavator.
    One of those scoops is the size of a car and the motors powering such machinery are just insane.
    Unscheduled maintenance means ships waiting in the harbor, which can be like $300K per vessel per day.

    So one morning the alarms trigger for the front wheel bearings and I eagerly report to the chief of maintenance.
    I get sent away with the message that the excavator is still running fine.
    Two weeks later the front buc

  • The lightening struck into a side of the building and hit the central heating pipes, at night.
    The next day we got a call, nobody could log in.
    Dozens of network switches, computers and some servers were destroyed.
    Central storage had to be rebuilt. Typically replace and reinstall. It took days to get everyone up and running again.
    We guessed it overloaded the electrical system through ground.

    We had some devices still failing weeks after the event took place.

    All in all, a great time to upgrade to the la
    • Just working at home, minding my own business during a thunderstorm, but you know those giant construction cranes used to build large buildings these days? The kind placed where the future elevator shaft is going to be, and the building is built around the crane, then the crane is removed?

      Of course the crane towered completely over my house, and of course the crane got struck by lightning and the EMP took out all my home I.T. gear. Some of it just died slowly, which was even worse in hindsight actually.
  • This is circa 2012, and I may have been doing Linux bringup on a brand-spanking-new cutting-edge mobile processor, at an unnamed facility in SoCal :). This is probably day 2 of bringup so the kernel is up and running, we have a console, etc, but most of the bootloadering and low-level init are still performed using JTAG. Being the sleep-messed-up person that I am, I naturally had a cup of tea on my bench. A hardware dude comes over and yanks a cable. I'm plugging along, trying to get the next thing up, and
  • Back around '91 I developed one of the first truly automated laser show projector systems, complete with a plasma touch screen and all sorts of custom hardware run from an embedded 486(!), we were doing our first major demo at the IAAPA convention in Dallas.

    We're setting everything up waiting for the union electrician to show up and hook up the large power drops for everything. I've got everything ready to go when the guy shows up. He starts working and half an hour later he say's he's done and then flip

  • I was tasked with doing pre-startup and commissioning activities at a Chinese chemical plant. We were well underway testing control and safety systems. Honeywell was here doing doing some database maintenance on all the operator stations at the same time so I took a break and sat myself in a coffee room. I overheard one of the contractors talking to one of the plant staff complaining about 2 large UPSes with the power cables just kind of running through the room and going underground. The staff were asking what the UPSes were for and the contractor didn't know suggested we turn them off to find out.

    It was Thursday morning I hadn't had my morning coffee yet so I didn't jump up and abuse everyone as to what a horrible idea that was. 10min later I walk out into the control room just in time for all operator stations to go dark. That's what the UPSes were for. No amount of dual PSUs can save you when you turn both upstream UPSes off at once. Fortunately due to the database work underway all drives were corrupted.

    I say fortunately because Honeywell told us it would take 2 days to rebuild and since it was Thursday I quickly jumped online booked a hotel and a ferry to Hong Kong and decided to have myself a fantastic long weekend.

  • I was doing maintenance work on two large 24V UPS supplies that kept the batteries topped up for about 4 safety systems at a medium sized refinery. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

    The UPSes were dual redundant down to each card in the safety system. That is each UPS had a distribution panel with circuit breakers, which spread down to more distribution panels each having a twin fed from the other UPS, which all spread down to individual card power inputs on the safety system which also had a second feed from the other UPS. The procedure I wrote involved visually confirming all circuit breakers were in the correct position.

    We took off the first UPS without issue and swapped out the capacitor bank. It did seem like a good day. Powered the UPS up again without issue. After lunch we came back to the second one, called on the radio "UPS12 B is being powered off, you'll get some alarms.". Suddenly an operator shouted back at us "We got alarms, turn it back on! TURN IT BACK ON!"

    Turns out one of the circuit breakers was broken internally. The switch was on but it didn't make contact. We knocked out the power to some 30 field I/O cards, together servicing some 400 field instruments. All being safety related it meant that for any fault something goes to the safe state. I felt, sick but the effects I wouldn't know for a few days.

    So 2/3rds of the refinery was shut down. Fluid Catalytic Cracker, Hydro Cracker, Alkylation plant, Jet Merox, one of the Crude units, Both of the Vacuum units, and the north ends Gas processing plant. However... The shutdown was not in any way controlled. There were procedures for dealing with a safety function tripping the plant, but there were no procedures to deal with every safety valve in the plant just deciding to close at the same time.

    In the Alkylation unit HF acid slumped in the towers rather than getting flushed out. The unit was restarted, flushed out, and shutdown for 4 days for a detailed inspection and x-ray.
    In the FCC we were near end of run, that means lots of coke buildup on the walls. Due to the sudden shutdown all the metal in the unit thermally contracted dislodging the coke which fell down into the first stage cyclone separators and blocked flow through the unit. They discovered that the following day while trying to startup.

    Summary: Tripping a medium to large refinery for a few hours is a $3million event. Shutting down the biggest money maker in that refinery for 2 weeks to clear blocked cyclones is an order of magnitude worse.

    Regardless of how many people say it wasn't my fault, the reality is I was able to write a new procedure that avoided that hidden failure.

  • My parents' 1890's house - no good ground. TrueVision Graphics Adapter - 24-bit video card that cost six months' paper route money, purchased for my 486DX-25.

    Dry air. 1" bright blue spark from VGA cable to port. No video signal. Sad boy.

    I may have been 14, but a half a year's salary mistake still bit just as hard as it would today.

    • Just think now though you would need a $15-$30K video card to equal that much time / money lost! Did your machine have a working "Turbo" button? I remember moving from an amber monitor to EGA, then to VGA. Ah, nostalgia! Kids these days never will truly understand "640K is enough for anyone!", my first PC only had 512KB...a 386SX!

      I now have a humidity monitor stuck on my rack and a full 42U rack in the office), and a humidifier in the house for the winter times when it drops to 25$-30%. Also, anti-static
  • I was once administered 5 doses of the polio vaccine, with an increasingly severe reaction each time. Protocol states to stop administering the 3 doses if a severe reaction occurs.

    somehow my doctor had Douglas Adams ability to count and at the end it fried all the wires on the right side of my body and the hardware no longer functioned properly.

  • From my PhD advisor: in the early 80s his Nd:YAG laser power supply was acting up. These power supply units were the size of refrigerators and had a lot of handmade circuits. A repair person came to take a look at it. Given the lax safety rules of the time, he came walking in with a nice hot cup of coffee and spent the morning drinking coffee and fixing the unit with the cup on a shelf inside it. When he was wrapping up, he went to grab his coffee and knocked it over, spilling the coffee all over the insid

  • I tipped over a bottle of oramorph (morphine in liquid form) and it spilt all over my Nintendo 3DS. Despite taking it apart down to the component parts, cleaning every piece multiple times, then putting it all back together, the home, select and start buttons are super-super-sticky (just like oramorph is) and I just don't know what else I can do to fix it...

  • A friend sent a couple grams of coke in a 5" floppy, and didn't bother to mention it. I stuck the floppy in, powder spewed out, and the drive head was ruined. This was in late 80s, and the drives cost around $200 - which was a lotta dough - it was worth about the same as the cocaine. Naturally, the coke didn't go to waste ;-)
  • An operator took wafer boxes into the personnel lock, instead of putting them through the material lock, and another (not paying attention) nearly shoved them off the dividing barrier. 3x25 wafers in shambles, about 100k USD...
  • I remember when we had to manufacture a special cable with parallel/centronics on one side and 240 Volt on the other side.
    During a moratorium on new hardware, it was the only way to get new printers by getting them to flame out.

  • In my favorite edition of "Pick the Lowest Bidder and See What Happens!" we contracted to move our classified data center from the Washington Navy Yard down to the Naval Information Warfare Center Atlantic. Some no-name company put in the lowest bid, despite zero experience with large-scale transportation of electronic equipment. I think they might have moved a few individual servers at some point in their past, but that was it.

    They showed up at the data center with a bunch of dudes and refrigerator hand-

  • I was working at a big networking company in 2000 and was tasked with configuring a soon-to-be-delivered Sun Enterprise 10000 [wikipedia.org]
    for a large customer. For those not familiar, this is a refrigerator-sized computer and fully-loaded went for over $1,000,000. The one we were expecting was about half-full, with 32 UltraSPARC II processors and accompanying RAM, etc. That's what the PO said, anyway. When we opened the back of the panel truck we found that the unit hadn't been secured properly. There were bits of brok

  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Monday April 12, 2021 @08:21AM (#61263218)

    What's your worst damaged hardware horror story?

    I once installed Windows Vista on a computer. The hardware ran fine physically, but never recovered psychologically.

  • by gmack ( 197796 ) <gmackNO@SPAMinnerfire.net> on Monday April 12, 2021 @09:48AM (#61263608) Homepage Journal

    Plugged in some new 48 volt telco side ADSL equipment the connectors were red and black wires coming off something that looked like a short ATX motherboard power connector. Screwed the wires to the fuse panel, turned it on and BANG, shower of sparks and a dead DSLAM. I call the company and they tell me that red and black are reversed in their country and I plugged it in backwards. Next few installs go OK. then BANG. "You told us you didn't like the colors so we reversed them for you.

    After that, the new DSLAMs came with screw down terminals with clearly marked positive and negative instead of the plug they used before. I was also told there was a protection circuit to protect against reverse polarity but we didn't test that.

    I should also mention that after the second explosion, I won the argument with the company owner where I had said from the beginning that the professional installers who did the fuse panel should also connect the equipment. I never touched 48v DC again after that.

Life's the same, except for the shoes. - The Cars

Working...