Plug in firewire device and monitor goes black

Howdy,

I plugged an external HD via firewire into a dell dimension 4300 and the monitor turned black - nada! The external HD was already plugged in to electricity. I could have bumped the monitor cord, so I unplugged to monitor from the computer, replugged it in, twice, and still nothing. So I took my other computer's monitor, plugged it in and got "Check signal cable". I tried to shut down in the dark, but could not so I held the power button until the machine shut down. Then, I plugged in the first monitor, started the machine, and here I am writing you.

Does anyone know what happened?

OS=xp home, patched and up to date.
Video card=?? p.c.i slot card with TV out
Firewire=self install in PCI slot

In addition, while unplugging the power cord of the second monitor, to test on the first computer, I unplugged the second computer's electricity, having the effect you would expect. So now I have cold-cocked both my machines. I am running CHDSK now on second machine. What damage does this do, to powerdown without shutting down? Is there anything to do to assess potential damage?


Thanks on all counts.

 

As for the firewire device, I'm not sure what's wrong. It could be any number of things, from driver conflicts to PCI bus mastering problems. Best idea I can think of is to start with everything powered down, connect the Firewire drive to the PC and turn the drive on, then power up your system. I never entirely trust "hot-swappable" devices, except USB pen drives which I've never had problems with. Edit: Has the drive worked fine in the past? Did you make sure to secure the PCI firewire card with a screw (or whever your Dell case has).

As far as system damage, sudden power loss generally only causes file damage. Any files that were open as well as any locations on the HD that were currently being read or written to could be damaged. The bad part is that a lot of system files spend a fair portion of their time being open, read from, and written to, so the most likely files to be damaged are your OS files.

I suppose it's possible for any physical device to be damaged in this way, but I would suspect those with moving parts. I wouldn't think it would be too likely, however. I remember back in the days of AT power people would connect all their devices to power strips and simply switch off the strip when they were done with their machine. Back then when you were using DOS the OS hardly ever had files open when you weren't running a program.