Re: computer hypothermia -- help!

[Kent West]

Nori Heikkinen wrote:

on Thu, 26 Dec 2002 12:24:18AM -0600, Kent West insinuated:

Nori Heikkinen wrote:

right ... i forgot to mention (important, i realize) that not only
was [the computer] in the car for 4 days, it was also in the car
when it hit a deer going quite fast.

So, how fast was the deer going? ;-)

:) well, i'm not sure, but it was directly orthogonal to the
direction i was going in, at highway speeds ...

seriously, can an impact like that fry a computer? i've made backups
and am going to fool aroud with connections in the morning, but i'm
wondering what i'm looking at here ... it seems kind of dire. :(

</nori>

Yeah, if the machine was sufficiently jostled, it could've knocked things loose, whacked a drive head out of alignment, etc. Or as others have implied, condensation, or thermal expansion/contraction broke a pin/wire/connection, or any number of things. If you've got a known working good computer, put the drive(s) in the good PC and see how they behave. This'll help you narrow down the problem to the drive(s) or to the rest of the PC. Or pop a Knoppix CD in to see if the rest of the machine seems to be working properly.

Back in the day when RAM chips/etc were put into sockets on the mobo, "chip-creep" was sometimes a problem. The thermal expansion/contraction caused by the circuits warming up to operating temperature and then dropping to power-off cold would cause the chips to creep up out of their sockets. A good hardware technician would just automatically press down on any socketed chips whenever he had the case open, to hear that satisfying crunch of the chips being reseated. You probably don't have any socketed chips, but the same sort of thing applies to solid connections as well, so you could be facing a hard-to-find broken solder joint, or a broken wire in the IDE cable, or any number of things.

Basically, you're just not going to know until you get inside the case.

Hope it turns out to be something simple.

Kent




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