[dmneoblade]

OK, I am a bit of a sucker for stories, so I thought it might be interesting to start a "story thread" where Techs can post thier stories. I decided to make this one about the wierdest fixes you have ever done. I'll start.

Friendly Windows
I was called in by a client of mine I had worked with a few times over the last few weeks. First, it was data recovery, then hardware installation. Now, I recieved a call that the computer completely died. My client had an extra tower lying around (Her son that moved out was a tech, and he left stuff), so I told her to bring it in case I needed parts.
When she arrived, I pluged in the "dead" computer. Quickly, I determined that the motherboard shorted out (just dealt with the same situation a few months before). So, I removed the Hard Drive and put it in the "closet" computer. Instead of dealing with driver conflicts (And since nothing had really been loaded on the computer) I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 98se. Started fine. Then when the computer rebooted, the OS was not detected. BEAUTIFUL. Can't continue installation.
Then, I tried it two more times. Still failed. So, I decided to make a system floppy and boot from that. No success. Then I tried putting a burned XP cd in the drive, so I could try to install XP on it. With computers, you just never know what would work. Well, the XP cd failed installation with a "problem copying files." It automaticly rebooted, and I left the room to get a glass of water. Nothing was touched. While I was gone, I realized that I left the XP cd and the floppy in the computer. I went back to eject the disks, and noticed something peculiar. The windows 98 installation was continuing.
Praising my lucky stars, I continued with the installation, ejecting the XP cd and the floppy (the 98 cab files were on the Hard Drive). When it rebooted to finish installation, the OS was not detected. Again. After 20 minutes of trying to get it running, I decided to put the burned XP cd and the system floppy back in the computer and let it reboot. I stared in shock as the computer booted without a hitch. I called back my client, marked the CD and floppy, and gave both to her with booting instructions. A month later she called back, and the solution was working fine. Somehow, the combination of floppy and CD were able to get the computer started.


Now, post your own stories, and lets see where this goes!

[hewee]

What a crazy fix.

[Rockn]

That is not a fix!! Why didn't you investigate why it was booting this way? Were there multiple OS's on the hard drive? Were there multiple drives in the system you added her drive to? Why is this the second motherboard that has "shorted out"? There are far too many questions that have no solutions here.

BTW...this isn't a poll

[dmneoblade]

Chill out Rockn!
to counter your arguments:
1) Yes it is a fix. It solved a problem. thus the definition of "fix" is fufilled
2) That's what I was try to do for 4 hours
3) Nope. 1 partition, 1 OS
4) Nope. 1 HD
5) you mean the "Dead" PC? Well, that is my analasys when the power runs, the fan in the power supply runs, the CPU fan does not, all plugs are plugged in tightly, and no boot data is sent to the monitor.

As for this not being a poll, you are right. I just changed the title for it. I wrote this at 2am, so I can expect a mistake or two.

[websurfer]

I'm willing to bet ANY amount of money it was one of the following:

Bad CDRom
Bad Floppy Drive
Or if you said the CPU fan wasn't turning did you try replacing it? That's going to be one hot PC if you didn't

I'm sorry, I have to agree with Rockn


I've done the same thing you've done before, and to keep doing that will run down the computer, I'd call that customer and get that PC fixed the right way if I were you



On my note of a wierd story, me and my dad were out in his PC shop, and he just got a new keybaord, he plugged in in his computer, booted up, and out went the processor, motherboard, power supply, floppy, cdrom, and video card We never figured out what caused it, but my bet is that the power supply was dieing and the keyboard had a malfunction, taking too little or too much power, causing teh power supply to finish itself off, along with the PC.

[dmneoblade]

eep! Thats one heck of a keyboard.
Also, a few points about this:
1> How can a CD or Floppy drive get so screwed up that it requires a SPECIFIC disk to boot?
2> The CPU fan wasn't turning because power was not getting to it. The computer was not booting at all. I could tell that from the absence of booting sounds (various clicks and beeps) that accomponied the computer the last time I had worked on it.
3> The customer called me the other day, and I recommended Dell for a new computer. We both knew that this would be a temporary solution, and so I went for the first thing that worked. The one I got running was a Pentium 166 found in a closet. We just wanted to get a few more good months out of it.

[kiregar]

Hey whatever works right

kiregar

[Seb7]

We have laptop that wouldnt power up, but amazing found out quite quickly it works fine on its side.

also,

Been trying to get a very old unix system work, to finally descover the processor wasnt fully attached.

[JohnJ]

Not sure if this really happened or not but......

I recieved an email that's going around a couple months ago about a tech who got a call from one of his customers. The customer said that they turned the computer on and it made some really strange noises and then smoke started to come out the back. When the tech arrived he took the case off to have a look inside. Curled up inside the power supply was a small black snake.

[dmneoblade]

BBQ snake? I suppose anything caught in a power supply would get small and black pretty quickly...
But, I wish I could have seen the tech's face.

[DaveBurnett]

I had a weird one with a mouse. Every day at about three in the afternoon one of my users would ring up and tell me his mouse was acting strange and would only move half way across the screen. I went to see it and when I got there it would only move a quarter across. I tried everything I could, but the problem just got slowly worse. Eventually the person in the next desk complained about the Sun reflecting off her screen and we shut the blinds - AND lo and behold the mouse problem went away.
wait for it.
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It was the sun overloading the optical sensor in the mouse.

[dmneoblade]

heh. One benefit of trackballs, eh?
Thanks for the heads up on mouse problems tho ~.^

[junker39]

I got a 6gig HDD out of an old "roadside" IBM. It was mounted upside down. It will not spin up when mounted the usual way. It's been working a few months now.Upside down!

[dmneoblade]

wow. now THERE is a wierd one...

[coderitr]

In the late 80's I worked as a technician for a university whose name I'll keep under my hat to protect the innocent. Anyway, about once a week I would get a call from a user on the opposite side of the campus that the diskette that I sent her for her weekly backups had stopped working again. Usually, I just grapped another 5.25" floppy out of the box, formatted it (that was at the time when floppies did not come pre-formatted) and stuck it in an interoffice envelope to her attention. One time, I got the call just as I was collecting equipment for another job on that side of the campus so I told her I would bring her a new diskette. When I got there, I walked into her office and was struck speechless. There, beside her desk, was the old diskette that "didn't work anymore" stuck to the side of the steel file cabinet with a refrigerator magnet. I told her she couldn't do that any more and (after the explanation why) she never called with that problem again.