Invisible fairies complicate computer diagnosis

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This will be among the most mundane and pointless posts in the forum, but it made me “WTF” enough to share it.

So I accidentally stepped on the power cord for my computer - dislodging the wire enough to cut power to the computer for a few milliseconds, forcing a restart.

I turn the power off, and then on again, just to - I dunno, reset the power regulators or whatever. Might’ve been unnecesary, but didn’t hurt.

So when I turn it back on, there’s this weird grinding noise. Oh, great.

So I check to make sure it’s not a fan - I stop the case fan, cpu fan, 2 video card fans, and the noise continues, so it’s not those.

Just in case it’s some sort of temporary problem, I shut the thing down for a few minutes then power it back up. No noise. Okay, great.

I go to bed, and leave the computer running. The next day, I sit down - and the noise is back. And not only that, but windows is now complaining that I disconnected a hard drive while it was running.

So I figure - oh, great, I guess it was delayed by a few hours, but now my hard drive is dead. I power off and on again, just to make sure that doesn’t make it work - and it doesn’t. The hard drive doesn’t even show up in the BIOS.

So, I unplug the hard drive, from the hard drive end - figuring I’ll give it a few hours of rest and give it a final try to restart it - (1) AND THE GRINDING STOPS, as one would expect.

So, I use the computer for a few hours without the hard drive, and decide to give it another try. I plug it in and power on. (2) Grinding is back, hard drive doesn’t show up. Yep, dead. So I pulled the drive, and physically examine it for no real reason I suppose. And then powered up again.

The grinding is still there.

But… the hard drive is unplugged, so wtf?

So, I look around. I forgot to check the south bridge fan on the motherboard - that was the cause of the noise. Why, then, did my hard drive stop responding? (3) Because mysteriously, in the middle of the night, the SATA data cable decided to fall out of its socket in the motherboard, which it has never done before.

But it was a very bizarre set of coincidences.

  1. The grinding stopped coincidentally when I pulled the cable out of the hard drive the first time. You might be thinking that it was the data wire itself rubbing up against the fan - and that’s what caused the grinding, and stopped it when the cable was removed - but that wasn’t the case. It grinded on its own, without anything touching it.

  2. The grinding had to resume coincidentally when I powered the hard drive up after having given it a rest.

and 3) The SATA data cable had to mysteriously fall out, for no reason, on its own, which it has never done before, at the same time coinciding with the mysterious reappearance of the grinding over night. The grinding didn’t actually vibrate the fan, it was just noisy - so it couldn’t have caused the cord to vibrate its way out.

I have no explanation for any of these three things, so it gave me a big WTF. Of course, I’m happy that my drive isn’t dead.

2

Those wacky fairies! They’re particularly fun when they invade software …

3

Part of my inner geek jolted after reading this. The computer was unpowered when you yanked out the SATA cable…right?

4

Yes - although I don’t think yanking the SATA data cable would cause physical harm, as the standard was designed for hot swapping. Although I’m not sure my controller is advanced enough to enable that functionally, I doubt it would cause any problems electrically.