What is the worst tech catastrophe you have experienced?

[aisle9]

I had an Antec PSU (a nice one, or so I thought) go to the great short circuit in the sky and, in the process, kill an ASUS Z97-A/USB3.1 motherboard. Oh, and an i7-4790K. And itself, of course. So I went back to Fry's and exchanged it for another one, along with buying a Corsair RM650i for my rebuilt system. I connected that one to my old PC, which I had given to my ex-wife: i7-920, Pegatron/HP MicroATX X58 board. I'm pleased to report the CPU survived. I'm sad to report the motherboard did not, and those boards go for $100 on eBay to this day in working condition with an I/O shield.

 

I was (and still am) rather furious about that. I haven't bought any Antec stuff since, I don't plan to, and on the rare occasions that Antec components have shown up in systems I bought to flip, those components ended up sold separately or, more often, dumped. Antec PSUs have a special place in hell.

[12345678]

frying something in a laptop that I just fixed because I forgot to place those anticontact stickers on the motherboard, and it shorted with the case

[Amias]

About 7-8 hundred gig of careful curated TV shows, movies, music and game saves ... gone in 1 second. Knocked off PC Tower. Click click ... Click click. F***. Lot of memories. Lot of great niche shows you can't find anywhere. F***. Still hurts. Even sent the drive off to be recovered by the company never responded after quoting £400 recovery. 

 

Later I accidentally spiled coke on my new mechanical keyboard. Washed it off. But it was detecting phantom key presses, so figured water was in the contacts. Had the dumb idea to dry with a hairdryer. Melted the space bar ...

 

 

[LloydLynx]

The PSU of an old Optiplex 360 had died. It seemed to be all ATX. I got the new Corsair PSU hooked up, flipped the power switch, smoke and sparking next to the CPU on the motherboard. So I guess Optiplex 360 towers are physically compatible with ATX, but not electrically.

[Bitter]

Not terrible but terribly annoying, just had an upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04 fail on me part way through hosing the Ubuntu install on my moms laptop, so I have to hurriedly fix this this morning!

[Stealthflanker]

My GTX-750Ti or the PCI Slot catch Fire in the mid of gaming.  Literally.  That's back in some years ago.

 

Still wonder what happened back then... It seems a weird power supply issue (it was cheap PSU's).  It killed everything except the harddrive. Turning me essentially into a laptop user for some years.

 

and there is documentation too...

 

 

Video0006.3gp

[da na]

I've had a GPU explode, luckily it was not a very good one (hd 3450) it was my testing card. I had a motherboard that wouldn't POST, stuck a GPU in the slot (I did the procedure right and everything, the slot was shorting out and several capacitors on the GPU board exploded when I turned it on.)

[tankyx]

Mining BTC in 2009 and having my parents formatting my PC after a month because "The fans were making too much noice we were worried it was breaking"

[jsrfuture]

• I was a heavy smoker, so I was deep cleaning my computer once a year. One time the pci-e lock moved back on a half locked position, my tri-slot gpu was so massive that I did not notice and ripped half the pci-e port off the mobo. I ended up unsoldering the whole port and kept using the motherboard for a while, using the second pci-e slot.

 

• I was testing new parts on my test bench case, I dropped a bottle of water on the ground, somehow, some droplet of water went flying right into the wrong part of the mobo frying it in the process.

 

• I was making mod for various game, kept a backup of the source on a USB drive. In the same week my hard drive broke and I lost my USB drive. Found the USB drive 6 year later, under the floor, not idea how it got there.

 

• I was doing maintenance work on my home lab, I wanted to delete a folder with useless symlink, I used the rm command. I have the bad habit of using similar names or composed name for my folder, so I copied the path then hit enter. There was space in the beginning of the path, so it deleted the first folder and everything in it, I didn't notice my mistake until it was too late. The disk was in use and data was being written on it so I couldn't get any of my data back.

 

• I test extensively my hard drive when I buy them, it takes about 2week. So after my 2 week test for my new Exo x16 16tb hdd I dropped it, it completely stopped working and I couldn't do anything to fix it. The seller agreed to refund me, even after I told him it was due to my mistake. But it was right at this time that the Chia crypto boom happened, I haven't been able to find a replacement, at a normal price, since.

[FrodoX570]

AIO liquid cooler blowing out and making a huge grinding noise, replaced the cooler and the GPU died a week later without any relation to it as the fluid never went on it, oddly the motherboard all the liquid dripped on lives on to this very day, although I have dissassembled the computer since then.

 

ASUS Rampage II Extreme x58.

GPU was the GTX 260 216.

 

 

[artuc]

On 7/28/2021 at 11:57 PM, Atridad said:

I have a hard time sympathizing with people not backing up something that important. Like the thought never crossed their mind????

Are you really living if you're not taking risks ?

 

 

[cacoe]

Christmas day 1996, my first pc for Christmas, I'm messing about with it. No idea what I'm doing and I switch the voltage toggle on the PSU, switch on the PC and greeted with a loud bang, spark and green noxious smelling smoke. I cried like a baby.

 

I'd killed it, my dad took it back to the shop and complained they didn't so much as provide a verbal warning not to do that. I don't think any PSU has had one of those voltage toggles on for years now.

[BetteBalterZen]

I guess the worst I've experienced was when I had my first kinda "high end" system, the motherboard started shooting nearly 5cm long sparks out. Looking back, it was hilarious... 

I had a MSI MPower Z77 "Big Bang" (kinda funny it was named Big Bang, because it went out with a big bang), with a i7-3770K, a MSI GTX 680 Lightning and 16GB of 1800MHz Corsair Vengeance DDR3. Was actually a pretty good system. 

One morning before school, I was sitting at my desk, eating breakfast, watching YouTube, when suddently my PC shut off. So I tried starting my PC again and then it happened. In the window of my NZXT Phantom case, I saw these huge sparks flying away from the motherboard near the IO. I pulled out the PSU power cable, and I just sat there, kinda not believing what I just saw... Well, I did not really believe it because I was dumb enough to attach the PSU power cable again and try to turn on my PC. And again, sparks were flying out - like 5cm long ones, and there was so much smoke in my case and room, it was so stupid. Total hotbox haha. 

I wrote to Komplett, the retailer where I bought the motherboard, and they agreed on the RMA. And yup, they could "confirm that motherboard did produce sparks" - haha no shit. They sent me a new motherboard. No other components were killed, only the motherboard hehe. 

[TeraBot452]

I put a 4tb HDD full of important files into storage.  I plugged it in yesterday and then I heard what could only be described as chirping noises.  The drive seemed fine at the time but then I heard the platter spin down, and then a LOUD pop noise (after I had unplugged it using the safe eject feature in windows) I plugged the drive back in and it sounded like the write head was screaming at me.  Needless to say I will probably be giving drive savers some money

[TeraBot452]

On 8/3/2021 at 8:49 AM, cacoe said:

Christmas day 1996, my first pc for Christmas, I'm messing about with it. No idea what I'm doing and I switch the voltage toggle on the PSU, switch on the PC and greeted with a loud bang, spark and green noxious smelling smoke. I cried like a baby.

 

I'd killed it, my dad took it back to the shop and complained they didn't so much as provide a verbal warning not to do that. I don't think any PSU has had one of those voltage toggles on for years now.

lol I had one in 2009 on an hp prebuilt, it was a core 2 quad machine.  But that PSU died a couple of years ago.  

[cacoe]

12 minutes ago, xXGaming123 said:

lol I had one in 2009 on an hp prebuilt, it was a core 2 quad machine.  But that PSU died a couple of years ago.  

Considering the potential for catastrophic failure, I think it's best that they're pretty much all region specific units now!

[Aaralli]

On 7/28/2021 at 1:21 AM, comander said:

I figure I should add in the worst disaster I had at work. 

Fiber optic cut in the middle of nowhere. The failover didn't kick in. Worst service outage in the history of the Fortune 100 company I was at. Imagine an Australian executive cursing with full furor. 

 

Yes, someone got fired. 

Where's "the middle of nowhere" in this case?

[TempestCatto]

Currently, Logitech GHUB. If you know, you know.

[sub68]

14 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

Currently, Logitech GHUB. If you know, you know.

it took me an hour to figure how to save a lighting profile on my G610.

I have it saved now but I am happy its done and don't have to change it.

[TempestCatto]

10 hours ago, sub68 said:

it took me an hour to figure how to save a lighting profile on my G610.

I have it saved now but I am happy its done and don't have to change it.

Currently many users over on Reddit, myself included, have been experiencing a stuck loading animation when launching GHUB (caused by an auto update). So to troubleshoot we totally uninstall the program, then when we go to reinstall we get a weird .dll error. Currently can't use the EQ profile I had meticulously tuned on my G935s. They still sound decent enough without an EQ, but I like a bit of a warmer tone. I just hope I was able to backup the EQ profile, as it seems the folder where that is stored is missing some files (before I uninstalled). It's just a shit show. Idk why they couldn't stick to the Gaming Software. My G105 and G700S use it, works flawlessly every damn time. If it ain't broke, don't break it.

[OldTweaker]

Stupid things I've done... Going back to the nineties: 

 

First: Scraped together a dual P166 mmx (96 mb memory!!) and as I was still using Windows (moved to Linux a few years later), had it running in dual boot with W95 and Windows NT 4 SR3. Why? because that would allow me to both play or encode a MP3 whist still having a usable computer. Window NT was needed to make use of both processors. However, whenever I booted in Windows NT, it would quickly BSOD. I ended up selling the the mainboard and cpu's second hand as it was no use. Then later, I think when installing the new main board that I bought as a replacement, I noticed that the fan in the PSU had completely melted. Turned out I hadn't thought about that two CPU's required a more powerful PSU. In those days (mid nineties) that wasn't really a thing. The PSU came with the case. No one looked at the power rating. Most likely a more powerful PSU would have solved the issue of NT crashing. 

 

Second stupid thing in those days: bought a second hand Philips SCSI CD writer for 500 Guilders.. A lot of money for me in those days. The thing however, wouldn't burn beyond roughly 500mb. Turned out it had been used by someone that probably burned a lot of cds with pirated software (which was a thing before widespread broadband). For this particular burner it was a known issue that after many writes a spring would get lame and it would not go beyond 500MB. I read somewhere that if you placed another CD on top of the writable it would go beyond. I tried ... and then the drive was really ruined. Learned a valuable life lesson that time on second hand stuff.

[Eshu Marneedi]

On 7/24/2021 at 9:59 PM, Pickles von Brine said:

What is the worst tech catastrophe you have experienced? Dropped a drive with your PHD thesis and had to have it recovered? Spilt liquid on your laptop right before a meeting? Did a minor technical glitch at work take down your entire environment? 

Mine was when I had lost my RAID 0 on my gaming machine years back. One of the drives ate itself and I had a college term paper on it. Now? I am paranoid and have like 6 backups XD
 

SSD failure with no backup—contained a video I edited for 5 weeks. Didn't have backblaze back then and wow, I lost a lot of data.

[Mondale]

A ransomeware attack that took out all PC's and servers at a company I worked for. 1100 employees couldn't work for 2 months while we got things back up and running.

[Salv8 (sam)]

i bought two second hand UPS's, one that was full of ants (i ended up killing the ants and throwing it away since i didn't trust it anymore) and another that i got a battery for (checked to see if it was compatible and it was) that blew up, luckily the server was safe but the next time i need a UPS, i'm just gonna buy a new one.

[Pickles von Brine]

Le Bump for the goodness