Posted on 10-29-12 07:44 pm
As a general rule, I feel like personal use of my own site should be discouraged. Nevertheless, there's been an interruption in my usual release plans, and as such, I thought I should supply a worthy explanation for what happened.
Yesterday morning, after a long weekend of working on other projects (school, family, etc.), I got out of bed early to get some work with WPH done. I turned my computer on as usual, and it began to boot Windows 8 just fine. Though, I noticed quite a pungent odor in my room, and after some evaluation, I decided it was probably coming from my heatsink, or something. It was then that I noticed a yellow glow coming from my tower's case.
Uh oh.
I called for some help and we disconnected the unit (which was still booting fine, mind you) and placed it outside, where it extinguished itself. From the pictures above, you can see the damage sprung from some sort of short on the hard drive SATA power cable. I'm assuming the bottom one started first, though the one above it, on a different power cable, also caught. None of the other cables experienced problems.
I extracted the drives to take a look at the damage.
Ouch. The computing gods must hate me. Out of all the places to catch fire, you chose my hard drives? And to make things better, I use RAID Stripe. In layman's terms, this means my data is spread across each drive, and if one is removed from the RAID, or fails, or catches fire, the data is lost.
Well, that's lovely. Fortunately for me, I have SkyDrive backup my files automatically, using symlinks. You can read more about my setup here. Anyway, the bad part is that I had added some folders to the backup, which hadn't finished uploading, and thus SkyDrive stopped syncing my other files to prioritize the other files. Since, you know, not backing up a 1kb code file before trying to copy a 1gb video file makes total sense. But anyway.
Most data was backed up like I expected. Wonderful. Some other things, however, were not, and while losing them wouldn't be a catastrophe, it would be nice to get them back. So part 2 began:
Extra lucky here. The hard drive that burned the most had an extra power cable, for old Molex 4-pin support. Good, because the SATA power was completely destroyed. Even luckier, the RAID actually worked and the system booted being none the wiser about what had happened to it.
So I have all my data, and I'm waiting on a part. I went out and bought an SSD, but my motherboard totally sucks (nForce chipset) and won't read the SSD without completely freezing. Lovely.
Until my controller comes in the mail, things will be a little rocky. I'll try to get my releases out, though. In the meantime, if you're wondering why Themes, CacheClearer, or any of my Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 stuff is missing, there you go. Better luck next time.
P.S. The failed PSU, or at least, what I assume failed as a result of electrical shorting, was a Corsair PSU about 2-3 years old. I talked to support today, and they said I should be able to send it in and receive a replacement. Here's hoping.