Your best PC blunders.... *OOPS!*

not quite PC but a server blunder, spent 8 hours working on converting a SQL database, last 10 mins cleaning up backup files I was not sure which was the live DB and wich was the last backup... I THOUGHT i have started SQL so thinking I was smart I randomly tried to delete a file (knowing the real one would be open and not deleteable..) however jsut as the file vanished I spotted the service was stopped.. and I realsied I have jsut deleted the live database
 
I did the whole pulling out the heatsink with the cpu thing. Apart from I was new to the internals of PCs and didnt know what the little lever thing was that secures the cpu and because it had just come out I thought this was normal, so to reattach the cpu i just dropped it onto the cpu securing mechanism (whilst closed) and secured the heatsink back on top.
Turned it on and nothing....I was confused for some time until I found out how to actually install a cpu haha.
 
I once spent about two hours in the middle of the night (you know how sometimes, against all common sense, you just have to fix something right away, even if it is 2 in the morning) trying to trace a really annoying high-pitched whining buzzing noise. I couldn't locate the source by listening, maybe because of the pitch, I don't know. So I altered fan speeds, recabled inside, booted with non-essential drives disconnected, moved the main HDD (which was mounted with a vibration damping kit anyway) to a different bay, in a different bay section, checked the cpu and graphics card coolers weren't vibrating, check that the graphics card itself wasn't vibrating (I had that once, quite odd)...and eventually gave up.

I realised that the noise was coming from my low-energy light "bulb". Had I not been doing all that in the middle of the night, I might have realised that the noise hadn't stopped when I powered my PC down for recabling, etc.
 
Forced an IDE cable in the wrong way to a hard drive. Killing the hard drive.
Broke the sata connector off the back of a new hard drive.
Killed a motherboard because of a fluffy static generating fleace I was wearing.
 
Sleeved my PSU cables (before the age of PSUs coming pre-sleeved), took my time and used a proper Molex connector removal tool to remove each connector so I could sleeve and heatshrink it properly. I was proud of the job until I'd plugged everything back in and tried to switch PC on and nothing worked.

As it turned out I rewired several of the 4-pin Molex connectors wrong - the red 12v and yellow 5v wires were in the opposite places to where they should've been. Net result was 1 dead Raptor HDD (part of a RAID0 config to boot), 1 dead backup drive and 1 dead DVDRW.

My heart sank when I realised the mistake (I could smell the mistake at around the same time).
 
Angilion said:
I realised that the noise was coming from my low-energy light "bulb". Had I not been doing all that in the middle of the night, I might have realised that the noise hadn't stopped when I powered my PC down for recabling, etc.
Click to expand...

Oh I hate that! I have often started doing PC maintenance when I really really shouldn't have - and then won't give up till I have finished!

Don't know how but I havn't managed to actually kill any components yet... A couple of builds back it took me 3 months to finish it though - RMA'd 4 items before finally finding out it was faulty memory causing the problem.
 
I spilled an entire pint of fosters into the open case of my PC, right onto the motherboard... WHILE IT WAS ON!

It fizzled and died, but amazingly (I still can't believe this myself) after a few days it was fine, with the exception of the GFX card, which had to be replaced.

It's the PC I'm using right now in fact. :cool:
 
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