Unintentional comptuer goofs

The hard drive in my beautiful Black Lotus gaming laptop has been making weird noises for a couple of weeks now. It says "whirrrr-CLICK!* several times a day, and occasionally it sounds like something crunches in there.

So I bought a new one on a great Daily Deal on Newegg. It arrived today, so I stuck the new drive in my eSATA dock, plugged it into the laptop port, and told Acronis to put an image of the existing installation on the new drive. It wanted to reboot, of course, and then went into its ugly DOS-like environment and started copying over partitions.

The laptop has turned off the display!

C:\ was 25% done and moving extremely slowly, and I have no way at all of checking progress, because the display has been turned off! I can't risk interrupting this until its done, so I'm going to have to leave it over-night to make sure, and I've lost the use of my laptop until tomorrow night! :banghead

I'm attempting to see the humor in Murphy working with my laptop to give me a metaphorical finger like this, but I would prefer to just use one of my katanas on Murphy instead. LOL

We've had a few threads on "stupid things I did to my computer" here, so I thought I'd start one on dumb coincidences that hit you while you were working, because you over-looked something like the laptop power-saver settings.

Post away!

 

I don't know if you are inviting comments on your post, so let me comment anyway...

I always have a bootable Acronis rescue disk, which loads the full Acronis into some sort of minimal DOS. Once booted, it can perform any action; it doesn't need any reboot (until it's completed), and of course the display remains visible.

 

Plug in an external monitor

 

That reminds me! I thought of you yesterday!

I bought a new keyboard. A microsoft wireless one. It's freaking beautiful. Black with white around the sides. All these shortcut keys, programmable custom keys.

On the back of the box, it says that it's waterproof, and can withstand any liquids :-D

 

My laptop came with one year of free accident insurance.

I left Acronis running over night, and the new hard drive now shows as "OS Disk D:\" so I'm going to swap them after work tonight. I'm not going to be stupid enough to try and replace hardware in the morning, before coffee and with little time to spare.

 

Actually, if I remember correctly, I suggested silicone spray to act as a water/liquid repellent/sealer to repel some of that inclement coffee. Then, there was a few sarcastic remarks, (nope, not from you), so I thought I'd better shut-up http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g309/Zobor/deadhorse.gif. Meh, it's worked for me on quite a few jobs. Can't remember whether I said about the covers, don't rightly recall that bit - 'prolly did.
Besides, you got it fixed anyhow, which is the main thing.
I actually got a whole pile of jobs from March's flash flood, with whole P.C's and monitors etc. literally full of water. The saviour rate has been about 85%. Mainly those who hadn't tried to power up whilst still full of water rolleyes.

 

You made me smile anyway, Laura .
I get some really strange sick I.T. jobs coming in at times, though. Had a woman recently complaining that her 'puter went dead all of a sudden and smelt 'funny'. So I took it in to look at it, and it sure enough, the machine was dead and smelt horrible.
Took the case apart and found a dead mouse lying across the power supply!:eek. Looked pretty fried, too. It must have squeezed in somehow and decided to relieve itself on top of the power supply :yum. New P.S.U and half a can of air freshener fixed the job. I've seen ant nests and roaches in computers from up north, but that was a new one.LOL

 

I think the stupidest thing I've done was when I was upgrading my machine the last time. The PSU had blown up, and taken the motherboard and everything else out with it. So through the kindness of friends, I got all these parts from various places in the country. Put it all together, and NOTHING. Tore it all apart, got a migraine from reading the itty-bitty print in the manuals, put it back together...NOTHING. Walked away for two days. Came back and did it all again...NOTHING.

Apparently, I had neglected to flip the hard switch on the new PSU.

 

Sarge,

Had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago. In the Senior lab I help maintain, went in and started up a machine. Nothing, only black screen, no cursor, nothing. Tried the various F functions to attempt safe mode, get into BIOS, etc. Tried booting from install disk, nothing. Declared the machine as dead, done, gone, finale. Then volunteer comes in, the guy who does most of the hardware stuff, I'm mostly software.

Tell him the issue, he goes around to the back of the machine, PLUGS in the monitor, Voila! Machine runs fine.

God they run better with a monitor! :-D

 

Yup brandy, but the 'hardware guy' in my case was my 85 year old mum when she heard me cussing at the monitor. Innocently asks "Is it plugged in?" Lo and behold the power plug on the CRT came loose since I had too narrow of a table and wire was hitting the wall.:-o:-D

 

And I don't know about the rest of you, but it seems like at least once a week I find myself saying;

Hmmm, never seen that before.

After doing this for 5 years, I wonder how long it wil be until I never say that again? :confused

 

roflmao

That made me laugh so hard The Guy left his new PC game to come into the room and find out what was so funny... he didn't see the humor in the situation at all. I think it's hysterical though. LOL

I do that every single time I work on my tower! Put it back together, press the power button, get nothing and have a second or so of total panic before I remember to flip the switch. The Guy thinks that is hilarious, of course... rolleyes

 

And in other news: The new hard drive is now installed, booted and is working great so far.

 

If only it were just a second or so. LOL Seriously...three DAYS it took me! :-o

 

That means that, unlike me, you'll remember it for next time.

 

Appearently the format command deletes everything. Who knew?

Boot.ini is essential to running windows 95...

And deleting the folders containing the programs is not the proper way to uninstall things...

DIP switches must be set in the proper position on older motherboards...

Aluminum foil is not a substitute for a proper jumper...

A hot knife to a power cable does not make it reversable...

 

This isn't really a goof but more of a happening lol
Working out on the Indian Reserve my boss asked me to print off a junk load of paperwork, so off I toodle, find the files, clicked print..... paper jam...pulled the paper, started again, several more paper jams, so I open the printer, check around, everything looks fine. Couple more attempts, more paper jams.
At this point a co worker (big native guy, 6'5" / 320lbs) comes in and we start talking about the printer being screwy, so he grabs a screwdriver and we start taking it apart.
As we're taking it apart we start finding shreded paper strips.... even more alarming we find some straw.... then as we are both peering into the darkness of the printer body, a mouse scurries out across the desk, followed by another one.

Of course the natural reaction for us 2 guys, him 6'5" and me 6'3" and totaling 550lbs.... is to scream like little girls and run away :-D

 

roflmao There is that! :-D