[R-390] Electrolytic troubles cause BIG problems...

[Jordan Arndt]

Well it had to happen eventually, and did it EVER...
On Thursday May 16th, one of the filter caps in my PC power supply blew
up, and spewed tin foil and electrolyte all over the inside of the power
supply.
The resulting voltage spikes, higher unregulated voltages, etc., took
out the IDE board on my hard drive, the control boards on both the CD
drive, the CD writer and, the network card I use for my DSL link.

I have had hard drives crash before, but nothing like this. The SMT IC's
on the IDE board now look like relief maps of the Rocky Mountains. I did
manage to get the data recovered fairly quickly and cheaply, but
replacing the drives and the Ethernet card was expensive...

I used a local Data recovery company, who actually had to find the
identical drive to mine, a Quantum Fireball 13GB drive, and swap the IDE
boards and dump the data to a third drive...
The hard part is re-building all the data and getting Win 98 to run
smoothly off the new drive...

I guess this might seem off-topic , but it goes to show how much damage
a bad cap can do...!

73 de Jordan....