Worst PC Build Screw Ups - Page 13

hehe... like booting into safe mode... or one of many admin reset bootdisks microsoft released.


But ya this isnt the place for this kind of information.

Comp,

That is a very noobish way of gaining admin access to a machine..

Especially since admin is still locked in Safe Mode.

He was thinking along the lines of loading up a Linux live cd like Gnoppix and mounting the windows partition and deleting the admin entry in the san file.

That is the upgraded "not noobish" way of doing this task

Just had to say it, just to have some fun...

Hopefully you noticed the humor

Seems like you did

If anyone missed it... the point of my post was that one of our "not much" Helpdesk staff couldnt figure out this simple prank, and neither could onsite support... which all ended in the machine being wiped and re-installed from scratch....

Off to look up the thread on pranks now... im in an office environment with sooooo much potential....

Too bad. I seriously need an upgrade, especially my gpu. My fx5700 barely runs carbon. My cpu isn't much to talk about either. The days of the Barton 2500+ has long gone.

Can't upgrade just yet though, need just a bit more. No use in upgrading little bit at a time...waste of money and I don't have that much to blow these days. Because of the rediculous ram prices I'm getting me a s939 X2 (I know it's old already but for me it's one heck of an upgrade) to keep my ram. For once I'll have a good GPU at least.

*edit* any donations will do

Similar story, a roomate of mine in college was putting together all of the pieces of his brand new 6x86. He had taken the HD out to tranfer files to another PC before formatting so the HD was sitting on the case, not screwed in place. He needed to turn the computer, so he picked up the HD, moved the case, and set the HD green side down on the case. Sparks flew and the system cycled. It still worked after that but there was some sort of MB damage as it detected a different random amount of RAM on boot from then on. Some times it would lose 24K, sometimes it would lose 4 MB, always some random amount.

Exploding drives??? Now that must be even more (not) fun than walking drives.

oh the pain...

well i can confirm that the little f*****rs do explode and that it nearly took my left leg off.

my mate thought i'd had some kind of fit when he came back in and saw my face. then he nearly had one when he realised two years of potentially crucial accounts data (and a collection of porn he'd been working on for a year) had gone out with a bang.

never thought i'd say this but thank god for zip drives 8O

Exploding motors?

What else would explode? The motor has 2 ball barings, and as any shop head knows,... when you spin the balls to fast, they tend to explode.

ROFL @ New trend.

I OC'ed my 7200 Maxtor to 7433rpms. My OS boots soo much faster now.

explosions would be easy to avoid up to a point, with proper cooling and lubrication. Keeping the RW heads in sync would be tricky.

I still wouldn't try it (and this is ME we're talking about).

Accelerating a motor RPM would probably entail hacking the firmware, doing some soldering on the board, changing the voltages in places...

Not something I'd try. HDDs are vicious little sods.

damn right

those things are lethal with a capital L!

just wait for the solid state drives, with a bit of luck they'll OC incredibly well

How exactly can one "overspeed" a hard drive?

Edit: actually "overspin" would be a better term. I don't think overclocking applies to HD since it's not a clock related setting.

Another question that comes to mind is will the read/write heads be able to keep up/handle it?

I just had to try it. Even though I said I wouldn't, I decided to anyway. Ah well... now that I am vastly more experienced than everyone else in overspeeding hard drives, allow me to share that experience with you.

It's NOT going to happen. EVER. Best case scenario, it's going to let the magic smoke out or make disturbing noises, mabe both, nothing more. Worst case scenario, refer to the exploding drive post above and work up from there.

So... if anyone wants to overspeed/overclock a drive, wait for solid state to become the standard or buy a ramdisk.

ps. casualties: 1x maxtor 30GB (no loss there), 1x socketA board (pity - no longer have one spare) and 1x 80-way IDE cable. Made disturbing noises and let copious quantities of smoke out, nothing more. No POST, nothing.

Your telling me you attempted to overspeed the hard drive using an PATA cable? Your numbnutts! YOu can only overspeed w/ a SATA cable, or a IC2x1XX SCSI cable that is terminated. Because PATA cables are made using trace amounts of Lithium and Uranium... you could have easily initiated a Nuclear explosion, had the overspeeding be just right. This would have destroyed your house.

Next time, do the research. Either SATA, or IC2x1XX cables that have been terminatd.

I actually tried doing that yesterday lol. Before then I had no idea what stand offs were, this being my first build from ground up. My old Dell motherboard had a metal plate on the back of it so I didn't see any and the instruction manual for the motherboard and case said nothing about stand offs. After about an hour of trying to figure out why the motherboard wasn't level and how I could screw everything in, I glanced at the pile of screws and it hit me that those stand offs are what I had to use. Didn't mess up anything but I felt kind of stupid.

Oh well, everyone learns through their mistakes

Thats dangerous. 12% of all the T2 DVD's failed this test....

I would think that this would be at best a very difficult OC.

Given changes to rotational speed I would think that you would have to do the OC and THEN install OS and follow on utils. Since the writes/reads would still happen at the same timing intervals and the position of the head would be diff erent. based on the rotational speed.

But if you write and read at the same rotational speed as initally started then I think all would be ok...

Just a little brainstorming. Then again the track info for the heads would remain the same and if you missed it on the first rotation the second rotation should find what you are looking for. You would just have the head available for read for the correct duration....

My head hurts

You start be sneaking into its BIOS through the BSB.

Rose colored glasses recommended.

It says right on the Seagate website: "Do NOT overclock our HDs. 7200 RPM means just that - leave the 10K to the Raptor!"

How the hell might one OC a hard drive?


Congradulations on winning todays "didn't read any previous post, but I entend to commment anyway" award.

I'm not about to even think of touching my server (the only system I possess which has SCSI) with a mind to OC anything, so that rules out SCSI.

My SATA resources are also too limited (4x250GB and heavily used) to even consider.

Ah, well. Don't overspeed HDDs, people! Dangerous it is, very dangerous.

I've almost completely lost track of who is joking and who seriously thinks you can just go in and change the rotational speed of your HD...

On a similar note I'd like to point out that it is possible to overclock your PCI and IDE *interfaces*. Modern motherboards lock these frequencies and SATA is fully buffered and just runs happily own it on frequency clock and turns the interface on and off as it pleases (with power-saving settings enabled), but back in the day you had to keep your ratios correct or you could corrupt your data, with occasional claims of HDs being permanently destroyed. You could, in fact, speed up your PCI and IDE bus by a few mhz and still have it function correctly (and people would do this to try and get a few more mhz out of their CPU if they couldn't make the jump to the next ratio), but I don't think anyone ever claimed that it improved performance although, theoretically, the bus could be overclocked by ~3% which should reduce latencies by up to 3% and increased bandwidth by 3% .

But really, for the love of noobs: you CAN'T overclock your HD. It won't melt down, or explode if you do, you simply can't do it in the first place. It's controlled by hardware, it's not a setting. There are power saving, integrity, and tempurature safety settings on some drives that you could disable to try and increase performance while possibly damaging the drive, but not the rotational speed.

Stop trying to confuse the poor noobs

Thats what we're supposed to do? Who the hell forgot to send me that memo?