so i was downstairs setting the parents up with a nicer DVD player when my mom comes down the stairs yelling "something popped and the upstairs smells like burnt metal"....

go upstairs and sure enough it smells like bad burning metal or something.

well I find the smell source, unplug it and bring it to the O.R.

a capicitor blew apart and a coil desoldered itself from the power supply board

it was "protected" behind a surge protector, so i'm goign to call the surge people tomorrow....has anyone ever done this before?

his 85 dollar 80GB drive is also damaged....

b

sounds like...hhhmmm, you know...if I had that jeep again, I might be in the mod to give you this really cool fast new computer...

And yes I have had it happen.

The surge protectors dont stop everything, and sometimes they get old and never trip the switch...

If the HDD still spins, I can give you some suggestions on how to save the data....and you will love doing it..its not that hard...just gotta be real clean.

Rich

well i sent the dad out to get a new identical drive so i can replace the controller board, which was fried too as a result of this little adventure.

he has the fastest computer out of the two people..my fastest computer is a athlon XP 1800+. He has a XP 2000+

b

May not be a power surge problem. A lot of the asian manufacturer's were building motherboards and hardware with defective capacitors.

so rich, you actually have literally transplanted drive platters?

I thought oxygen tarnished the platters so they wouldnt be useable anymore?

b

I actually transplanted the voice coils and heads from another drive years ago. It worked long enough to retrieve the data on the drive.


But after recovering the data, I trashed the drive.

QUOTE (914GT @ Jan 22 2006, 09:18 PM)

May not be a power surge problem. A lot of the asian manufacturer's were building motherboards and hardware with defective capacitors.

hmm..intresting

the power supply replaced another one.. which died suddenly too.

teh shitty caps on the faulty P/S no doubt caused this....I was wondering what exactly triggered it...i mean this thing was *OFF* when this happened.

POW!

b

in the right conditions, you can get the data off of the raw platters, yes.

The key is having duplicate hardware...

I like your idea better.

If the data is really worth something, it does not cost much to send it to a lab and they will send back a CD in a few days...

I have done it, back when it cost like 1000 dollar for a drive to get the data...

Nowadays, computer forensics has come a long long way, and there are alot more guys out there, so the prices have come down quite a bit.

Rich

the local computer place (and my former employer) charged 500 USD to transplant hardware and hook it up to a "specialized software" package to pull data from the drive.

ask MikeZ how much data I got off the drive for him....

and this drive *WAS* a clicking, dead drive.

i did it with linux just took like four whole days.

thanks guys for helping me out.

I'll just toss the idea of pad power surge supression around with the surge people and see what comes out of it.

thanks again

b

If it really was a surge I would expect all the other electronics in the house to be damaged also. (TV etc)

Most likely it was just a fault in the power supply. They do die, sometimes spectacularly. I don't know who makes decent power supplies these days, I think everything is just the same rebranded Chinese OEM stuff.

antec's pretty good IMHO, but the power supplies are like 100 bucks for the middle of the range one.

b

QUOTE (bd1308 @ Jan 22 2006, 10:01 PM)

QUOTE (914GT @ Jan 22 2006, 09:18 PM) May not be a power surge problem. A lot of the asian manufacturer's were building motherboards and hardware with defective capacitors. hmm..intresting the power supply replaced another one.. which died suddenly too. teh shitty caps on the faulty P/S no doubt caused this....I was wondering what exactly triggered it...i mean this thing was *OFF* when this happened. POW! b

I'm just guessing here, but if you're finding evidence of leaking or blown capacitors then it could be related to the problem affecting a large number of manufacturers - especially for motherboards. These caps were made with a bad formula which caused them to bulge or vent electrolyte out their cases soon after they were made. I had a motherboard with a few of these caps around the processor. The caps were not properly filtering the power supply voltages and it would cause intermittent lockups. Most computers today are not completely 'off' when the power switch is off. The supply is still partially on to supply standby voltages. Maybe something blew up in that section of the power supply.

Cheap power supplies are never cheap in the long run.

When I build a system I will always spend top dollar to get a quality power supply to build the system around. I get Antec and haven't had one fail yet.

tomshardware.com usually has recommendations on good power supplies.

Also, every computer system in my house is connected to an APC brand UPS. Not so much to keep the system on during a failure, but to supply clean power to the PC.

WD800JB is the model of the drive i need.

and WD800BB's are all around.

Fortunately for me, my drive was actually purchased in a triplet fashion (old RAID array) and I know the new owners of the other two drives.

I did find a WD800JB but it didnt work.

b

QUOTE (bd1308 @ Jan 22 2006, 06:56 PM)

has anyone ever done this before?

i evaporated a couple of chips on a add-on serial card once. in the days before LAN cards ...

we were playing "Battle Island" over a serial cable and because my friend kept looking at my monitor, i moved my PC to another room.

too bad that room was on a different power circuit. the voltage difference on the ground wire between the two circuits was enough to turn the add-on card into vapors as soon as i plugged in the serial cable ...

loud bang, lots of smoke, nasty smell ...
Andy

hehe...good ol' serial connection.

i remember doing internet stuff over that.

I started into networking when 10Base-2 was in style...BNC baby!

b

Think I found out why the caps are blowing...

Article in a Science News about whisker growth causing problems.

No, not on yer face, on electroplated metal films in electronic devices. Isn't that how they make capacitors? Plate metal on a plastic sheet, roll up the sheet, put it in a can and call it a cap.

Article explains this has caused 3 satellites to go dead as well as shutting down a Connecticut nuclear power plant.....

And you thought your power supply capacitor pop was loud!

Ken