smoke and mirrors… or at least just smoke…
My rig had a *minor faliure* this afternoon. I was playing C&C or something, and I heard this crazy noise coming from one of my RAID drives. then I see a spark throuigh my BlingWindow(tm) coming from the vacinity of my hard drive bank. screen goes black. I get this terrible feedback through the speakers. I shut down the computer, and as the fans were spinning down I heard the feedback noise get lower in pitch, so I figured the noise must have been from one of the fans being fried or something. Smoke comes out of the top of the computer from the power supply area. I says to myself “Oh damn.”
I have a little 2-digit display on my motherboard that reads codes off port 80h to give me POST codes in hex. Normally it just says “FF” which means that POST is over and the OS is running. Before I shut off the computer I took note of what it was saying. It was giving me code B7. there is no code B7. again with the “Oh damn.”
I decided that my power supply had blown. I figured that one of my drives failed in such a way that it bridged the power circuit somehow. I yanked the PS and looked inside. sure smelled like death. fan spun freely though and made no wierd noises when I powered it up with a battery. Upon closer inspection, I found a transistor and two capacitors that had changed to a delightful shade of “ubercarbon”, and had a nice little halo of black around them. toast.
My brother is in Poland teaching english, so I stole the PS out of his box when I was home for easter dinner. It’s only 300 watts, but it seems to be keeping my system running alright. I’m getting a new one tomorrow but I wanted to troubleshoot for now to ease my nerves. much to my pleasure, my computer is powering up and behaving normally. I haven’t touched the RAID drives, and I think I’ll leave them be till I can get a *disposable* test rig. they had all the episodes of Cowboy Bebop and Big O on mpg and my photoshop scratch space, but nothing other than that really. I learned from other people running RAID-0 that it can be a bad idea to keep critical info on them.
but at the end of the day my system is fine. Only took about 20 seconds of resetting some BIOS values. one less drive, one less power supply, about 10 gigs of missing data, and a little hurt pride. everything else is running well.
OMG you let the magic smoke out!
fwiw i have a 400watt Antec and it’s quieter than my processor fan.
gimme the big O episodes 🙂
yeah, I’m getting an Antec TruePower 430 watt supply today. My computer would flake out under heavy loads sometimes, and I think it was the power supply. so at least this gives me a good reason to go and get a new one.
And yeah, I’m going to miss the Big O episodes. they were really hard to collect. Cowboy Bebop was pretty easy to come by. this’ll teach me to start doing hardcopy backups.
thats the one i have. cost me $90 and it’s uberpimp.
if you wanna talk about hardcopying, tereza had every inuyasha episode on her machine. then when i went to install UT2k3 and the red orchestra mod i was like “you have no space left” it was sad. she’d probably be able to tell you how many CDs it came out to be.
I’m looking forward to getting this PS since it has fan speed control. my 2 rear case fans are both fans from server power supplies, and they run at almost half an amp. very fast but very loud. the throttle control will be a welcome addition.
I should ask her. I’m all worried that I’m going to have to manage an infinite number of CDs, and go fumbling through to find CD #46 when I want to watch Roger kick the crap out of Rosewater. It’s a tragedy huh?
DVD-R?
good call. I thought of that too a little bit ago. I ganked a DVD-RAM (archaic, but free) from work when we *retired* a computer. I can’t fit a whole season on one side of a DVD, so I’d end up with at least 2 or 3 DVDs double sided for each series. that’d get pricey enough that I’d rather to just deal with 1.359 metric fucktons of CDs. that’s a lot of fucktons.
yeah, happened to me at sirk’s and Jims place after a lan party. Obviously computers run on smoke and mirrors, you let out the smoke… and you are all done.
AO
It’s like automatic transmissions. Autotrannys work by magic. If you open them up, the magic escapes. you can’t put the magic back in, so when you bolt it all back up it won’t work.