Francois Caron

What's that smell?

I have been jinxed the last few days!

It all started out when I wanted to make a backup of my system to an external hard drive, an 80GB Maxtor in a Bytecc enclosure. About 75% through the procedure, the drive stops responding.

After much fiddling around, I finally managed to reset the partition table on the backup drive and tried to repeat the backup procedure many times. No soap. The drive may be dead.

So I opened up my Shuttle SS51G to connect the drive directly to the IDE bus and run a disc utility from Maxtor against the drive.

A note on my Shuttle box. I've replaced the fan inside the power supply with something very quiet and attached a Molex connector to the leads. I also created a fan header cable with a Molex connector at the other end, allowing me to plug the fan either directly to the power supply or to the fan header depending on what I wanted to try out.

Because of a lack of power cables, I normally use a Y adapter to connect the hard drive to the power supply.
Now for some reason, I got all these Molex connectors mixed up, and I don't know exactly how I did it, but I believe I connected the fan header's molex connector to the hard drive.

Realizing my mistake, I immediately turned off the machine and unplugged the cables and rearranged them in the proper sequence. I turned the machine back on, I started to smell something... burning?

Yep! Plugging the fan header in the drive must have fried it! Now it was starting to BURN BABY BURN! So much for the diagnostic! BUT IT'S NOT OVER YET!

After taking the drive out, I restarted the system. After a while, I realized something was amiss. I couldn't hear the power supply fan anymore. Yes, I did remember to connect it back to the fan header. I put my hand on the side of the power supply, it was VERY hot!

Obviously, I also burnt out the fan header on the motherboard. :b

So after TRYING to make a backup of my data in case of a hardware failure, I indirectly provoked TWO separate failures in the process! Luckily the computer still works and nothing was lost. But did burning out the fan header cause any other damage to the system?

Maybe it's time for an upgrade.

Tekara

Well, I've burnt out my fair share of fan headers; I still own a 5+ year old computer with a burnt out fan header. So if it's any solice, I haven't ever seen any secondary ill effects from a dead header.

"Computers are a lot like air conditioners - they both work great until you open windows." -Anonymous
"The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will agree to meet them halfway." -Bernard Avishai

Francois Caron

Thanks Rob. That's basically what I needed to know. It wouldn't surprise me if the headers were designed to safely burn themselves out in case of a short.

And the computer still works! Too bad the PSU fan is a bit loud now. But at least I know it's still spinning.

I'm still planning an upgrade one day. This Shuttle box has the buggy SiS chipset that makes burning DVDs very difficult if not impossible to complete even with the latest BIOS updates. I don't have a DVD burner yet, but it is on my to-buy list.