Ahhhh crap - Reactions to computer problems

[atg]

This is about the O Crap/shit/hell moments that you have when woking on a pc and something bad happens

Mine is from the weekend when one of my hard drives decided to go belly up and decide it wasn't inititalized or have a file system.

It had about 90GB of data, not critical stuff, mainly virtual machines I'd been testing stuff in, versions of Linux etc. I've been able to recover about 6GB of data from it, which is most of the more important stuff, but the rest seem to be lost.

Oh and I didn't have a backup

[Uraniun235]

Hey, while I'm here at Fry's, I might as well pick up some RAM! It's nice and cheap and it should go well in the system I'm planning to upgrade to in a few months!

My motherboard's kind of dusty, I think I'll shoot some canned air into it before I put this new RAM in!

Okay, turning the computer on... funny, there's no beep... what's that smell? Why is there smoke coming from my motherboard? Why are some of the contacts between the old stick of RAM and the motherboard charred? Oh hell!

Well, I guess it's time to upgrade sooner than I thought. What? PCI-Express motherboards for AMD processors don't come out for another couple of months?!?

And that's why I'm still on AGP.

[Shadowhawk]

I had removed a power supply from an old NEC external CD drive to use to power HDDs that I'd hook up to test/transfer data from with an IDE->USB cable I got. The cable came with a shitty PSU that didn't work, but these external enclosure PSUs worked great.
So I had removed it, then removed the mounting plate and cut it down to size. It was sitting on my desk, and sorta close to a foil-wrapped piece of chocolate. I was testing the fifth drive or so, and something got nudged. There was a blue spark, some smoke, and my computer shut off. The desk had a scorch mark, and the PSU's PCB had scorcing as well.

"Oh, fuck."

I turn my computer back on, and miracle of miracles, it boots! It's acting like nothing went wrong at all. Maybe I got off lucky.

Only partially. The short cracked a surface-mount resistor in the USB cable, which apparently did something to fry the front ports of my case. I still haven't gotten around to checking to see if it was just the ports or if the damage extended back to the motherboard header. Since everything else works, and I have a 7-port Belkin USB hub sitting right in front of the computer, I haven't felt a pressing need to do more testing.
But, damn, I had visions of "New mobo, CPU, RAM, video card = $$$$" dancing in my head.

[Sharp-kun]

New PC, Athlon 64. Put it all together, checked everything was seated right, and turned on.

The fans start, lights come on....

Nothing happens.

After 5 minutes panicing I realised I'd forgotten to plug in the CPU power.

[weemadando]

I can never get sick of watching PSU fan flamethrower moments. PSU burnouts are fantastic.

Also good - improperly mounted or just plain fucked RAM exploding in its slot.

[Ace Pace]

New PC, try to plug in old harddrive, everything is connected properly, turn main power on.

BEEEP, BEEP BEEEP! BEPEPEPEPEEP!

To this day I have no idea what caused it, but the room was destroyed by my screaming.

[atg]

Another of mine was about 6 years ago when my father had a computer from work at home to log in remotely. So I've decided to install linux onto a spare hard drive I had. I've left the main drive connected and the install has wiped out part of Windows 2000 the windows boot loader.

I reinstalled Windows 2000, but couldn't replicate the domain login settings as it needed to be done when connected to the physical network first.

Luckily it was just before he quit his job and didn't use the login after that.

That was my first play with linux and I didn't touch it for about another three years.

[FedRebel]

Upgrading the RAM, computer turns into the roadrunner, as soon as the WinXP boot screen appears the comp shutdown and restarts, try going into safe mode, same shit happens

My reaction: WTF happened?

Fifty bucks lighter I find out I didn't put enough preasure on the module, thusly I proceed to bang my head on the desk

[Netko]

Having a failing hard drive finaly fail is always fun. Or it corrupting the MBR. One fine day you go and power up your comp for regular stuff and BLAM "No system disk" (of course by that point you are dreading it happening after daily chkdsk auto-scans do to errors at boottime).

At a friends place I've expirienced the legendary "white smoke theory". So we are sitting down at the comp and he is showing me some stuff, suddenly there are some strange cracking noises coming from the computer. *POP*, things go dark and teh white smoke has fled the PSU! Oh noes!

White smoke theory: every electrical device has a finite amount of white smoke in it that makes it go. If that white smoke escapes said device no longer likes doing work so it doesn't.

[Beowulf]

Having a failing hard drive finaly fail is always fun. Or it corrupting the MBR. One fine day you go and power up your comp for regular stuff and BLAM "No system disk" (of course by that point you are dreading it happening after daily chkdsk auto-scans do to errors at boottime).

At a friends place I've expirienced the legendary "white smoke theory". So we are sitting down at the comp and he is showing me some stuff, suddenly there are some strange cracking noises coming from the computer. *POP*, things go dark and teh white smoke has fled the PSU! Oh noes!

White smoke theory: every electrical device has a finite amount of white smoke in it that makes it go. If that white smoke escapes said device no longer likes doing work so it doesn't.

blue smoke, not white.

[darthdavid]

Ok so the year is 1999, I'm like 9-10 years old. We have an old IBM multimedia PC running windows 3.1. We're about to leave for a family camping trip and I'm getting in some Jet Fighter II before we have to go. All is going fine as I come in for a smooth carrier landing and... Wait... Why are there rainbow colors on the wall behind the monitor? And where in unholy fuck is all this smoke coming from? Moooooooom. Sadly my mom lacked any computer knowldge and despite half an hour of pleading failed to realize that you could buy a new monitor, and that it would probably cost less than a whole new computer. Which we didn't get untill '01 any way... . Anyway, that computer ended up on the curb for some schmuck to pick up. Atleast I can take some consolation in three things
1) She included the monitor so it might have burnt down someone's house
2) It was an unholy piece of shit, even for the time.
3)Now that she knows better she still gets embarassed when I remind her of that incident.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Back in the hairy old days of the AMD Athlon with the high-temperature Thunderbird cores, I made a habit of cleaning out the accumulated dust from my CPU heatsink every so often (and I used to live out in the country, so this was something I did rather often.) This involved pulling the heatsink from the machine, blasting out the dust with some automotive brake-cleaning solvent (great stuff, useful for everything, since it dries with no residue.)

I do this one night, stick the heatsink back in the computer and turn it on. After a bit, there's a sudden "WHUNK!" sound and the computer spontaneously shuts itself off. I look inside the computer and go "Awww, fuck!" As it turned out, the heatsink had fallen off the CPU. Though the motherboard had turned the computer off before the pyrotechnics could start. The real "FUCK, FUCK, FUCKITY-FUCK" moment came when I looked at the CPU socket and realized that the reason the heatsink had fallen off was because the one of the plastic tabs the heatsink latched onto had broken off, which meant: motherboard replacement time!

And this was when I was a college student. Even more fun was when my laptop (I'd switched to my laptop as my main computer while my main, now heatsink-less computer sat gathering dust while I waited for the replacement parts to arrive) harddrive made funky grinding noises a few days later and died.