I was mucking around with my wintel box and trying to figure if the HD was really fried or not (parts from different people/places) so like a wise guy I threw the drive into my G4 ... hell it's a MAC and can take a licken ... (more money pays for better parts )

G4 didn't like the drive either ... so plugin in the old drive again dead folder ... ? ... (errr .... blue screen of death)!!! 60 hours of work and applications bye-bye ...waaaaaaa [cry]

Went out and got me a slick Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40GB and came home to find that my WesternDigital 10GB had a bent pin ... sh_t ... sh_t ... ohhh I was lucky. Waste of money but the work, time, files, installation time and configuration is worth more than a 40GB drive !!!

OH well, I'm gonna slap the 10giger into the wintel box ... and to boot I got me-self a faster and bigger master drive ... should see better system performance! and now look forward to rebuilding a system again.

wooooo thump thump -- beat beat ... heart returns to normal.

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

Lol..I've fried many motherboards Some cables dont have numbers or slots to tell you where to put them either! LOL...a funny time was when I was on work experience at my collages ICT department. The tech guy decided it would be clever to remove the motherboard without any static protection....he fried the system

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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Guess he wasn't much of a tech guy then.

You should always ground yourself before you touch anything inside a computer.

One of the silly LED's on the front of one of our servers was not working and a contract support guy was telling me to plug it into a certain pin (it was bugging him, not me) so I did and the box made a little 'piff' noise and then smoke came out of the top of the server. Since then I've learned that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The power supply on my home PC blew a while back. I turned on the computer as usual and "POW!" flames (well, sparks actually) shot out the back and the most awful smell filled the room. Apparently one of the little diodes (or transistors or something) blew out like a pop corn kernal exploding. That system has never been right since.

Man, you guys are terrible with hardware... It's not all that bad like you guys say, that or you guys are doing something terribly wrong!


Adrian

You still have to be careful because static can trash internal parts.

But simply leaving the plug into the socket (making sure it's off, though) and touching the computer case is enough to earth you and the hardware.

- wil

working with hardware is like gambling .. you either got the touch or you don't.

well ... I got my OS X finally moved to another drive. I re-installed just for fun ... I didn't just copy it over, but I bet I'd would've saved myself hell of a lot of hassles just going to the command line and copying the entire drive over ... I setup up a user after the original install ... big mistake. Also, netinfo which is a GUI for user/and what ever else ??? administration has a major bug version 10.1 which wasn't in 10.0.4 ... I wanted to backup my user settings.

Now I just have to backup my mysql db data from my backup copy and install all the wonderful componets again for apache ... NOW I'm really thinking that a simple would've been better.

ahh hell ... each install or problem is a learning chance in disguise.

after all this fun is finished I'm gonna move the 10gig drive to my wintel box. fun to learn over there too.

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my wintel mother board is from Abit ... all slots and cables are clearly marked !!!

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after opening my G4 after ages ... and playing with a wintel machine I've realised that the G3 cases / mother boards are a real work of art ... no screws for the case just a hoop latch and presto instant acces to the mother board (it's attached to the ... the ... ummm ... lid ... so to say) you don't have to be an acrobat to slip on the cable to the CD drive or HD ... just look down and and do your work. Plus lots of reports have come in that dos/v wintel parts work nicely too!

I wonder if my wintel machine will prove me wrong and show me to the way of the darkside is actually easier ...

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

I've had a similar experience.... back in august I had a nasty computer virus that wiped out some essential Windows files and I wasn't able to reboot. I was afraid that if I reinstalled Windows that I'd lose everything I had. So I went out to buy a new drive and decided to buy parts for a new system seeing how cheap it was. Not knowing what I was doing, I plugged a few wires on backwards and blew out my floppy drive. after the smoke cleared out I pulled the floppy out to look at it. There was a nice hole where a black chip used to be. That's why I read installation manuals now,

A big pet peeve of mine is those IDE ribbon cables that keep coming apart when I need to switch out my drives (5 drives and only enough connectins for 4). The connection piece always splits off and stays on the pins.

--Philip
Links 2.0 moderator

don't pull on the ribbon then ! <--- sorry I couldn't help...

Actually Apple with the G3 boxes on use cables that have a pully thing so that folks won't have the urge to pull the plug by the cord. Well, we do pay more for the main box ... so what can you expect!

apparently the OS is cheaper for a Mac too!

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OK, I'm back with a few hickups outta the way. I did end up using the ditto command to copy over my BSD based system ... required a dummy system to handle the copying of the files from 1 partion to the other ... the only troubles so far is that mysql took a dump (is that a pun or what!) on me ... hehe, now I got the latest build going.

Thanks to the swiss guy at http://www.entropy.ch/home/ !!! he even has a sweet little uninstall script for mysql over there

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mysql is in beta for 4.0 ... hmmmmmm

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openoffice + gimp + sketch ...

My own bad experience came from transfering a hard drive - I had it just haphazardly in the machine - the drive was touching the power button in the front of the case (this was one of the old AT-style power supplies - when the power button actually had current going through it). Anyway, when I put it together, the computer was not plugged in. I plugged it in to start the transfer... ZAP - sparks. I yanked the cord out of the back, and then smoke started seeping though the corners of the case. Oh shit...

I opened it up and looked around for what had happened - it took me a while to figure it out. as the drive was sort of hidden (this was a rather cramped desktop case). Eventually I pulled it out to take a look at it, and part of the metal casing of the hard drive was black. Anyway, I moved it well away from the power button and tried again. This time, there were no sparks, and everything worked smoothly.

The drive still worked perfectly (and is still running to this day - this happened a couple years ago). I think I agree with Adrian - computers and components are pretty damn tough when it comes down to it.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com