Hot Stuff

[floppybootstomp]

Several months ago I was doing something inside the computer my daughter uses, put it all back together again and switched on.

Immediately clouds of thick blue acrid smoke poured out from the top case fan vent and the rear of the power supply.

Thinking I'd totally messed something up real bad, I opened up the case again and peeked inside. I noticed a stray loom wire had snagged the lower fan of the Antec Truepower 430W PSU, stopping it from spinning, so I freed it off and secured the wire away from the PSU.

When I fired up again, all was well, everything worked OK, and it's worked OK ever since.

Today I thought I'd swap out the two old IBM 20Gb drives that have been in there a whiles and are now about four or five years old, and replace them with a single 40Gb Maxtor.

So imagine my surprise when I saw this (see pix below). The floppy PSU connector cable had burnt right up. That was obviously what caused all the smoke.

That must have been some current that flowed to cause that, but why should it happen? All I did was prevent one PSU fan from running. I've cut off what remained of that floppy PSU cable and have used the other one. Have yet to try it out.

 

[Matt Jason H]

The only way that i can see that that would happen is by shorting the connector out. Seen it before, but it's usually on full Molex connectors hitting on case corners and stuff.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Yep, a short would sure enough do the trick.

I suppose, thinking about it, two PSU loom wires may have been trapped in the PSU fan blade and it could have cut through the insulation of both, causing a short, but it don't seem feasible somehow.

But I can't honestly remember now, it was over three months ago, possibly longer, that it happened.