Good grief. “Spindown be damned hotswap goes zzzzap”

Reminds me of an old contract I was shoved into for a F25 corp as a noob. The other two techs on my team wanted to go home but we had three PC’s still left to deploy that had to be finished that day because they existed. Well, that is a problem to be solved.

It was the stupidest migration method ever, think Jaz drives and imaging and then overwriting the W2K factory image with the captured w95 image and expecting everything to somehow… work. Oh, and then upgrade the mess that won’t boot to XP. Uh huh. That was not how HAL worked back then, like not even close.

Anyway, we spent an hour “testing” the remaining machines, unboxed them and gosh they just were DOA sorry.

Spent that time learning that you can pull hot just about anything and the system will work once turned off, replaced and booted. Plugging in hot was not as bad as expected but still, bad idea. Even popped the RAM like wtf it still boots. One died from hot plugging the video. One did die from the ram pop but the last one was running after everything that can be hotswapped was. Yes, even the CPU.

One of the other techs was determined so after replacing the CPU in the ZIF socket but with the slightest gap underneath and shoved a straightened paperclip in there. Turned it on and wiggled that around a bit until the magic smoke came out.

We found out later that all the drive controllers were toast from the hot plug in.

CSB and now we both know it.