Biggest catastrophe

[APFelon]

How often have you spent 50-500$ for a new piece of hardware, only to have it fail in a spectacular fashion? Not just general wear and tear, but a failure SO LARGE that it burns a hole right through both sides of your skull?

Here is mine, and it has to so with my A500. I had an apartment a few years back where the heat would fail. I don't know about where you live, but here it can get to be -30 fehrenheit. My biggest crash happened on one of those nights.

The heat failed, freezing me, my fish, and everything else in my apartment. I left a disk in my attached disk drive (hey, it happens) and when I ezected it, some of the emultion came off on the disk head. 300$ USD down the pooper. What about you?

[Shatterhand]

Hmm..

My PC disk-drive wasnt working, but I needed to acess a disk. So, I got a disk-drive borrowed from a friend, I opened my PC, removed my drive and inserted his one.

When I turn on my PC.. POOOOWW! A high noise and smoke all over the place. I said "What the fuck?", I turned off the computer immediatelly, and checked all the wires. Everything correct. I turned it on again, but now it wasn`t working.

The Motherboard just blew up or something. And the disk-drive also stopped working too. I never knew what the hell happened that day, but at least that made me buy a decent motherboard (the fried one was a crap PC CHIPS all onboard), and my rather good for the time TNT 2 videocard.

[Drake1009]

I voted "Just woke up to find it broken", not because that's what happened though but because it's the closest to what happened. It was at a LAN party, all day the computer had been a bit quirky (Well I guess that's what you get when you place it on a table next to a guy playing Counter strike) seeing as how when the guy next to my computer slammed his fist into the table out of anger or disappointment or whatever goes through the heads of counter strike players, my computer'd reboot. Finally I got the hint and put the computer on the floor.
2 reboots later it just didn't want to boot. Tried booting from harddisk and got a ê as the only thing on my screen. Well try booting into fail safe mode. Same result. Well how about skipping the boot sequence and going to DOS. Nope.

Was clear by that time that my harddisk was knackered so I buggered someone at the LAN party to borrow me a boot-disk so I could reformat and reinstall. In goes the disk. Load goes the diskdrive, ê goes the computer. WTF?
I tried fiddling with the hardware, nothing. Got others to fiddle with the hardware. Nothing!. Cursed at the computere, it stuck it's tounge out at me from the diskdrive (Well not really but it would if it had a tounge I'm sure).

Finally after 2 hours of no progress I went to bed decided that a LAN party without a PC wasn't any fun so I'd go home in the morning.

Then I woke up and my computer was just working. Noone had been near it, but it was just working again.

[Pyromania]

Well this did not hurt my A500 but in 1988 when I was working for Commodore in the Philippines I powered on my A500 and once it got hot TONS of ants came running out of it. I opened it and there were many dead bodies to be found. It never hurt the Amiga though it continued to work well even though I don't think I got them all out of it. This did not happen @ work it happened while I was living @ a friends house and we wanted to play a few rounds of Battle Chess and or Kult. The machine went on to give me many good years of service. I did not sell this machine until 1992 when I was in Saudi Arabia. This A500 was painted black and green military style and had lots of upgrades like a Mega Midget Racer 68030 50Mhz Etc. I had modded my Miggy almost 10 years ahead of everyone else. Now modding your computer is a big thing but noone did it in 1992. I later sold it to a brit living Saudi, he was one of my mates while I stayed there for three months. I also made great friends with an Aussie that lived there as well. I wish I could remember their names because they loved Amiga's and we enjoyed visiting the computer shops together. Also I would like to buy that Amiga 500 back. It is the machine that started me down the path of the Amiga mindset.

[manicx]

This happened back in 94:

It was a beautiful day and I was getting ready to go to a football stadium and watch my favourite team. I was messing around with my miggy when I opened Opus 4, cicked the folder with my graphics' work and pressed delete. Of course I didn't want to delete this folder, but another one called Grephics_Temp. Disaster. I lost 70% of my work. Some amazing hand drawn pictures were lost and nothing was the same since then. Unfortunately my HD was ADF-formatted and there were no utilities to bring back my lost files ....

[Pyromania]

Hi manicx

I am also Greek and will be going to Greece next year, how is the amiga scene there?


Whoops off topic

[fiath]

Put a 586 chip in a 486 board. Fried both.

[Belgarath]

went out to the post office one day came back to find the psu on my pc had blown up, so couple of days later got a new case and psu, turned it on, worked for a while and suddenly that blew up, psu remained fine but the motherboard, cpu and the c: drive was fried, so week later got a new motherboard and cpu, worked for a few hours and then yup that blew up as well this time taking pretty much everything with it. threw everything away and got a brand new system which thankfully has shown no signs of blowing up yet

[Steve]

I'm quite embarrassed to say this but here goes. About 7 or 8 years ago I borrowed Ishar III from some guy I knew from school. It was a copied version of Ishar III and not the original. This guy didn't look after his disks very well so they weren't in the best condiion. Anyway I'd been playing it for ages and got really far but I hadn't saved the game. I got to a part of the game where I needed to insert another disk into df0. I pulled out the disk and to my horror the metal shutter had come off inside the damn disk drive. Here comes the bad bit (turn away now). Not wanting to lose my position in the game I decided to perform open-Amiga surgery. My mission was to remove the shutter from within the Amiga disk drive while it was still on!! That was Big Mistake Number 1. Big Big Mistake Number 2 was using a metal knife to extract said metal shutter whilst the Amiga was still on. Eventually I prised the little git out. When I inserted the disk it wanted (surprise surprise) nothing happened. I'd completely screwed up all the drive heads as well as some other important hardware. Basically I'd totally screwed up my Amiga and it was completely unusable. I didn't have a hard drive at the time. I was only in my early teens and this had to come out of my pocket money. It cost about £100 to fix and took nearly a year cos I'd given it to a guy I knew across the road from me who could fix Amigas. He was always busy and I had to keep bugging him to fix it. I can't think what I did for that whole year. That's my only (thank god) Amiga Catastrophe!

spilling coffee all over the computer? My (seemingly) biggest catastrophe was when I did indeed spill coffee all over my Miggy 1200. I had just installed my new Blizzard 1230 card and was enjoying the new power it unvieled and I must have got too excited and knocked me bloody flask all over. I proceded to panic and promptly turned my miggy upside down to stop the coffee going any further. I gave it a little shake and thought that it would be alright upside down for an hour (switched off of course) and left to drain.
I put the miggy the right way and switched on.........
nothing.....
WTF?
I nearly s**t my kegs with worry. I thought that the sugar content of my coffee had disintegrated some of my motherboard or even my new Blizz board!!!!! After a restless night at work I decided to have another look at my miggy to see what was what. Something told me to look in the trap-door and lo and behold I found the bloody problem. Thank God for that.....

Problem: Blizzard card had work loose from the expansion slot.
Solution: Re-seat it firmly and stop drinking bloody coffee next to my beloved machine.

Needless to say it never happened again.

[BippyM]

I have not voted cuz the option isn't available!!!

Anyway when I got my a500 for Christmas 1990 (I was 15) I was thrilled, anyway at the end of Jan beginning of Feb one of the metal sliders came off the disk inside the disk drive

Anyway being the immature/stupid/foolish/curious kid I was I decided to put a knife into the drive and try and remove the slider BIG MISTAKE!!!

Thats 1 Disk-drive dead -- still there is always the warranty, play dumb eh

erm... well no... not when you have a stupid 15yr old!!

I decided the best option would be to open the computer and repair it myself !!! Ooops bigger mistake

So not only did I kill a perectly working diskdrive I also killed 11months of warranty

Lucky my dad didn't kill me eh!

anyway I had to save and get a new disk drive and pay for the cost of a new cia chip to be fitted .. total cost to me then was oooh! about £150.00

[CodyJarrett]

I put an IDE hard drive on only half the pins once by mistake and turned on the Amiga - the hard disk went on fire and smoke belched out it...

[BippyM]

Well I f*ck*d a perfectly good Amiga 2mb ram expansion 2 days ago

Being the inquisitive type!! I decided to open this a500 w 2mb ram and kick 2.05 (more to see what type of ram nboard it was, cuz some wire went off into the miggy!)

anyway I opened up and found a cradle from the ram board to the gary chip!! being curious I pulled this cradle out, now the cradle has the Gary chip seated in it! anyway I went to put it back in and didn't notice 2 bent pins, pushing a bit too hard I snapped them

Lets say that the ream board doesn't give me a proper 2mb now

if anyone has a solution for the 2 broken pins.. I am all ears as kick 2.05 isn't too nice in a 512k machine

--

Also my a500 keyboard developed an error (same one as I killed in previous post) and cost me £60 for a new one!

I went on to sell aid a500 with games, external drive, knackered keyboard (number2) for £200 and bought a fine A1200 for £299

[KombatSanta]

Well... I don't know where to start?!?!

Back in the 80's: My power supply unit to my c64 melted

90's: got a new PC and dropped the monitor on the floor, even before I had the chance to plug it in. Installed a new graphicboard wich made a loud "pop" and a mushroom cloud (small one).

00's: no problem yet!

[Amiga1992]

My worst Amiga catastrophe was when my sister was playing Premier Picks (nice PD game ), during a HOT summer day, and the machine suddenly locked up and smoke started to come out of the PSU.

This was my second PSU blowup btw :P I had 3 total. Now I never turn on me Amigas in summer.

The most disastrous one I did was with my C128... and I was not a kid :P My SID chip started to sound strange. I know now the problem but back then I had no clue.. I had the smart idea of plugging in the SID while the machine was on...

It never turned on again :/ Now a friend of mine fixed it for me and she's back in shape

[BippyM]

Originally posted by Akira
This was my second PSU blowup btw :P I had 3 total. Now I never turn on me Amigas in summer.

So do you erm... Lameulate in the summer then???

[Mr Creosote]

My biggest hardware crash was a crash indeed. I just came home from the computer store where I had bought a new hard drive. Got out of the car and the hd somehow slipped out of my fingers on the stony ground. Crash! Fortunately, the owner of the store believed me that it must have been broken already when he sold it to me

[BippyM]

I dropped my Cumana External HD on the driveway.. It died.. Gosh I didn't have much luck thinking of it

[Shatterhand]

I have other 2 stories then... I tell one now and the other one later.

A friend of mine got the HD of another friend, so he could plug its hd on his computer to copy some games.

He was holding the HD in a hand, then he opened his PC, and while he was messing with the wires, the PC thought it would be a good idea to throw some electricity into his body. He got an electrical shock, and he instantly yelled "OUCH", and the HD fell from his hand.

The HD of course stopped working. He had to pay another HD to the guy. Even funnier is that the HD was just 2 Gb, but when this happened, he could only find 8 Gb HDs or bigger, and the guy just didnt accept a 2nd hand HD.

This friend of mine got really pissed up

[Djay]

my pc still suffers from it.... :!! UPLOAD PROBLEMS !!: