Anyone got some crazy computer repair, networking or IT stories?

[Pickles von Brine]

So, any of you have some crazy computer repair stories? Either difficult, different or just downright weird (gross) lets hear them!



 

[bleedblue]

I repair PC's as a side gig. Computers from smokers are the worst. They smell really bad and have gunk and shit trapped in the heatsink fins and fans that are pretty hard to get off.

[Pickles von Brine]

@bleedblue
Dude, I know what you mean!

 

Probably one of the worst ones I have seen was this:

 

A customer brings in here MacBook Pro 17" Late 2011 into our shop because it has a RAM beep. I get it checked in and start looking into the computer. Here is what I find:

 

• Antenna cables snipped cleanly (probably scissors).
• Fan cables snipped.
• Plastic sticker over RAM pins peeled off and looks like an object was drug across them (likely scissors).
• Machine was sealed and looked as if no one had gone inside. 

 

Apparently this lady's kid was punished at home and he had taken revenge by destroy his mom's machine...

 

It needed a new display, new motherboard and fans. Something like $1350+ in repairs. 

 

The fact the kid even took the time to CAREFULLY take the machine apart and ruin it is scary. Last I heard the kid was sent off to boot camp for "re-education".

 

[Dabombinable]

I once installed my old Tecra M5's replacement CCFL tube with its wires stuck into the plug of the old one, and blu tack holding the wires in the plug. Everything worked perfectly until the motherboard decided to give up on life.

Note that I also use blu tack to hold wires in place:

• fan adapters
• molex connectors
• pretty much any situation where the wires won't go above body temperature (the blu tack softens past it)

[itisme911]

LOL I found this guy moving to cali like the next day or something, he had a I7 2600k system with 2 hd 7970's 2 ssd's and a 500gig hdd in a carbide case. 16gb ram. ANYWAYS he said it wasnt working and he just wanted some money for it so I got it for $100USD, remember this was 4 years ago. Turns out the ram was in the wrong slots and the gpu werent seated properly(coulda been the cables to them too). After fixing ram and reseating everything the system worked fine ^^

[Pickles von Brine]

Not bad. 

[DimasRMDO]

Not hardware related, but when my friend's laptop was infected with more than 1000 malware (virus, trojan, worm, bla bla bla) not long time ago.

I told her to do a clean reinstall but she refused, I removed all of the detected malware, it got better.... But everything would've been easier (even better) if I just did a clean reinstall, besides she lost a lot of files too (games, old work files, etc.).

[Pickles von Brine]

@DimasRMDO

You know when a system gets like that you can do a few things after to fix stuff:

 

Run all virus removal software (use multiple like MBAM, Hitman Pro, Adware Cleaner, etc)
Then once all that is down use Tweaking.com's Windows Repair Tool. It does an amazing job of fixing all the crap left behind. It even will repair broken system files (usually). Takes forever to run though. 

[minibois]

I typically don't do the repair stuff in the store I work in, but someone came up to me with his laptop and he wanted a quote for a repair (I suspected in hindsight for his insurance).

It was regarding a repair of a 13 inch laptop, which it looked like someone set something extremely heavy on it, because it had an extreme curve in the entire body. The screen was obviously cracked, we didn't open the laptop up (to avoid damaging it some more) but looking at the curve and looking online at internal picture; the SSD inside must have broken in two. Same for the RAM.

[Pickles von Brine]

1 minute ago, Minibois said:

I typically don't do the repair stuff in the store I work in, but someone came up to me with his laptop and he wanted a quote for a repair (I suspected in hindsight for his insurance).

It was regarding a repair of a 13 inch laptop, which it looked like someone set something extremely heavy on it, because it had an extreme curve in the entire body. The screen was obviously cracked, we didn't open the laptop up (to avoid damaging it some more) but looking at the curve and looking online at internal picture; the SSD inside must have broken in two. Same for the RAM.

I had a guy bring in a MacBook Pro 15" Late 2008 which was smashed by a hammer (and I mean smashed). Apparently he cheated on his girlfriend who was russian... Oh, BTW, the hard drive's platters were shattered. If you moved the drive it sounded like sand was moving around inside. Pretty bad. 

[imreloadin]

I used to work for a large company that had a ton of field support techs that would go out and install/service their security systems and they'd just mail their laptop in sometimes if they had a problem.

 

One day I receive a box from one of them so I open it and inside is a note that says "won't boot". I'm thinking he fiddlled around in the BIOS and messed something up so I pull the laptop out of the box and go to open it and the lid with the screen just comes right off. The guy somehow managed to completely shear off both hinges so the lid just lifted off the thing. The whole "wont boot" message was kind of an understatement

[ShawnTD]

Had a late 30's dude bring in an alienware desktop(pretty badass machine) to a store I use to work at. Had problems with it booting up and turning off. The aio was clogged full of dirt and the cpu was overheating. Anyway got it booted up and it brought back up his internet browser and all the tabs recovered.....furries...furries everywhere, even some...non clothed ones, scarred for life.

[Pickles von Brine]

2 minutes ago, imreloadin said:

I used to work for a large company that had a ton of field support techs that would go out and install/service their security systems and they'd just mail their laptop in sometimes if they had a problem.

 

One day I receive a box from one of them so I open it and inside is a note that says "won't boot". I'm thinking he fiddlled around in the BIOS and messed something up so I pull the laptop out of the box and go to open it and the lid with the screen just comes right off. The guy somehow managed to completely shear off both hinges so the lid just lifted off the thing. The whole "wont boot" message was kind of an understatement

Yeah I'd say. Probably dropped the damn thing to boot. 

 

@ShawnTD

 

HAHAHAA!

I had a dude who managed to get 2 disks stuck in his MacBook. One was El Torreno. The other? A porn disk. 

Though the record I had was when someone brought in an iMac that had "a" disk stuck in the optical drive. Take the machine apart and open the disk drive. Guess what? There were FOUR disks inside. How in the hell that happened I will never know. 

[DimasRMDO]

3 minutes ago, Lord Xeb said:

@DimasRMDO

You know when a system gets like that you can do a few things after to fix stuff:

 

Run all virus removal software (use multiple like MBAM, Hitman Pro, Adware Cleaner, etc)
Then once all that is down use Tweaking.com's Windows Repair Tool. It does an amazing job of fixing all the crap left behind. It even will repair broken system files (usually). Takes forever to run though. 

Yep I always do that, I'm just worried there's still hidden malware left behind (I use Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool, Norton Power Eraser, AdwCleaner, Avast, too many to list).

I can be paranoid sometimes, so 1000 malware = format reinstall for me.

I usually use the Windows installer to repair Windows, but it wasn't necessary that day.

[Pickles von Brine]

1 minute ago, DimasRMDO said:

Yep I always do that, I'm just worried there's still hidden malware left behind (I use Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool, Norton Power Eraser, AdwCleaner, Avast, too many to list).

I can be paranoid sometimes, so 1000 malware = format reinstall for me.

I usually use the Windows installer to repair Windows, but it wasn't necessary that day.

Yeah on that sentiment I can understand. Definitely better for a wipe/reinstall at that point. However, when a client wants you to do something you gotta do your best to uphold that. Then again, it also comes down to what is best for that case. 

[Pickles von Brine]

This isn't a computer repair story but it is a data recovery one. 

A couple of years ago I was a data recovery engineer at a data recovery company. 

A company from Wall Street sent in their RAID to us as apparently 4 disks had dropped off. So, this is the story of literally stupidity. 

Customer gets the drives to us via courier. I receive the drives that night at 11:30PM (a friday noless). This raid consists of 16 Seagate 600GB 15k 3.5" SAS drives. All of the drives are labeled 0-15 and is setup in RAID 5 with hot spare...

 

After testing I find that drives 4, 7, 8 and 11 are all bad. After contacting the customer to get more info, I talk to their IT guy. Apparently he just got hired at the company 4 months prior and this entire mess falls into his lap. The hot spare supposedly had failed back in 2014 (at the time it was 2016). Then, another drive failed and the system ran in a degraded state for nearly 2 YEARS!!!!!!! Holy hell. When the RAID failed 4 disks suddenly dropped off and after a reseat and reboot 2 drives came back but no data. Anyways, I digress.

Upon examining the drives I find that drive 4 is completely done (see attached photo). Drive 8 doesn't power on. Drive 7 is degraded and takes 27 hours to image. Drive 11 is also degraded and takes 18 hours to image. The other healthy drives take 90 minutes to image to give you a rough idea how badly degraded they were. Drive 8 does not power on. With some tricks I drives 7 and 11 had 2 and 6 unreadable sectors respectively. 

 

I start working on the 2 known good drives to see what they are. Drive 7 belongs to the raid. Drive 11 however is the hot spare. That means I need drives 8 and 7 for a successful recovery. Well, that is after trying to find RAID order, direction, parity layout, stripe size and if it used some other form of parity calculation other than industry standards. Drives 4 and 11 are useless to me. 

 

 

Drive 8 turned out to have a bad PCB. So, I use one of the other drives in the RAID (they were all identical) for a donor of a PCB. After swapping the ROMs at the solder station I get drive 8 to power up and image. That was short lived... After imaging about 88 million of the 1.7 billion sectors on the drive ti began clicking. Further examination of the drive I had discovered platter damage. So, yeah. Drive ate itself. 

 

That means I have  a RAID 5 with 16 drives and hot spare missing 3 drives. I could only have 2 missing. 
 

Now, all of the above happened over the weekend. I had literally slept on the floor next to the desk for nearly two days... with about 8 hours of sleep total since that Friday. 

On Monday we contacted the customer and I told him we could try to get some information off the array by scanning it and looking for data that fits inside the strips of the raid array. However, that later proved to be useless as 98% of the data we recovered was corrupted garbage. 

 

Best part? This raid had no backup and had historical financial data for our customer's clients. Looks like the SEC was going to have a field day with them if they caught wind of it. The second best part? The reason why the didn't have a backup is because the CFO of the company stated, "we already spent our IT budget this year". The new IT guy for this company on day one wanted to get a backup going for this server and he was blown off. 

All could have been avoided...

 

[MandoPanda]

1 hour ago, Lord Xeb said:

Something like $1350+ in repairs.

Did she pay it? Did you do the work?? I would have just recommended she get a new computer and helped with data transfer.

[Pickles von Brine]

1 minute ago, MandoPanda said:

Did she pay it? Did you do the work?? I would have just recommended she get a new computer and helped with data transfer.

She got a new machine and I transferred the data to it. It was not worth fixing at that point. 

[MandoPanda]

1 hour ago, imreloadin said:

a ton of field support techs that would go out and install/service their security systems

Yikes, they don't even know basic computer skills and they're field tech support??

[Pickles von Brine]

Just now, MandoPanda said:

Yikes, they don't even know basic computer skills and they're field tech support??

You would be surprised dude. I have seen guys who are geniuses with networking but cannot use a computer even if their life depended on it. 

 

[imreloadin]

6 hours ago, MandoPanda said:

Yikes, they don't even know basic computer skills and they're field tech support??

Some of them do but most of them only know enough to do their specific job and that's it.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

So I got an i5-2400 rig for free, right? Yes, free. So I get this R9 390 for it and I'm going to sell it and this dude comes to see it and it gets 58 FPS on... I think it was PuBG and he's like... RRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE you said 60FPS NO SALE. That happened.

[Tristerin]

My Manager 15 years or so ago wanted to take this old PC in his garage and get it "web ready" and "school ready" for his 12 year old daughter.  It was some old old custom PC in this puke green case - anyway I put in a new HDD (its old one was tiny) put Windows 95 on it and a few applications she would likely need from Microsoft and gave it back to him, did it for free (sans HDD cost) cause he was my boss and it wasn't like it was hard.  A week later he comes to me and says is acting funny and wont connect to internet and blah blah blah - Im thinking okay more hardware issues.  He brings it to me, I take it home and the hard drive is riddled with the worst of the worst click porn virus' you could find.  So I do a fresh reinstall of everything and give it back.

 

A week later he says its doing the same thing (mind you this is for his 12 year old daughter - and I didn't want to assume SHE was watching pr0n) so I finally told him why it had acted up the first time and that Im not sure WHO was doing the surfing but...it was what it was.  He was pissed at ME!  Said no one in the house uses this PC but his daughter and how dare I.

 

So I said - for 100 bucks Ill fix it again, because that's the cost going forward since it was likely to occur again unless the User changes behaviors, or they get some security (AVG wasn't enough apparently). 

 

100 bucks later fresh install of everything I give it back...1 week later...I told him not to take my word for it but to take it to a PC repair shop.  After that he apologized and his daughters PC was taken away.

 

[Radium_Angel]

14 hours ago, Lord Xeb said:

So, any of you have some crazy computer repair stories? Either difficult, different or just downright weird (gross) lets hear them!



 

I posted a thread like this a little while ago, here it is

 

[jonrosalia]

does that im currently installing lasers at citi field for pyro night which involves ILDA cable cat5 and fiber to get everything talking and setup in the stadium the fiber is the new stadium im using cat5 for control and the controllers and lasers connect together with ILDA network switches, yellow bricks and FB4s lol  am start and its almost 1 am now hoping to be done soon and get some sleep.