Antisocial Hardware?

87C751 asks: "Over the weekend, I happened upon a deal: 10/100 PCI NICs for $1.99. I bought two and installed one in my Linux box. The box came up to POST, and the new NIC started looking for a DHCP server (which I thought was cute, if useless). Once that timed out, boot sequence continued to the message "NTLDR not found"! In an attempt to do a PXE net boot, the new NIC had -rewritten my boot sector!- Granted, a few minutes with a GRUB boot floppy set things right again, but why in the world is J. Random piece of hardware arrogant enough to frob my disc? Has anyone else been bitten by antisocial hardware?"

Comments

Antisocial...

[fredrikj]

If by 'antisocial' you'd mean hardware that detracts you from a social life, then, yes, I have plenty of antisocial hardware.

Re:Antisocial...

[ksheff]

But that hardware at least keeps you doing something other than just sitting in a room and staring at the walls or watching the garbage broadcast on television. I wouldn't have much of a social life with or without the hardware, but the hardware keeps me from going insane.

The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

The NIC did not eat your boot sector. I'm very familiar with the design that appears on the web page you posted and there's no way that the NIC could have done it. It has NO way of storing executable code onboard unless there's a flash or EPROM chip installed.

I don't know how your boot sector got trashed, but it wasn't the NIC hardware.

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[ComputerSlicer23]

I'll second this. I've got 3 or 4 machines that have this hardware in them, they run no problem. I don't do NT. I'm doubting very highly, they completely screw up Windows NT, but run just fine under Linux. I only have Linux, and they run like champs. I get them in the pre-assembled white box place that has cheap PC's locally. It's the only network card they have pre-installed. They work just fine. The poster might have one that's all screwed up, but that line of hardware runs fine.

Kirby

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[Ayanami Rei]

It has NO way of storing executable code onboard unless there's a flash or EPROM chip installed.

Are you sure? Because when the BIOS went a-callin for a PXE boot device, something on the network card had to answer with a BOOTP attempt, and my guess is that it is an onboard EPROM. They sell those cards with and without them, and from his description, it sounds like there was one installed.

Unless it was built into an overzealous motherboard BIOS (assumed it could find an NE2000 compatible card?)... but I highly doubt it.

Speaking of antisocial hardware: If you have a Dell Precision 410, note that you can use both the built-in IDE and SCSI at the same time. But if you install a secondary IDE card (for doing, let say, IDE raid), the motherboard helpfully disables the existing IDE chipset for you. There is NO WAY to prevent it from doing that, and I have not had success trying to get it to reinitialize at a later point under OS control. This is quite frustrating when your boot drive was IDE, and you then have to scurry to find a SCSI drive big enough to hold its contents (and you thought you were going to save money with IDE raid... v_v)

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[/dev/trash]

I think I agree. That ahs to be a pretty big flash chip to have an NT boot loader in it. Either that or it's so smart it looks for NT on the network.

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[rf0]

Could it be that it did actually find a Windows server and tried to boot off that? Its the only thing I can think of as to actually build the MBR to know about NTDLR from a NIC. Nah can't see it happening

Rus

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Are you sure?

Way sure. The chip is a Realtek RTL8139. You can see the data sheet at www.realtek.com.tw

I don't want to post a full url because they are dogmeat slow under best of conditions.

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[Robbat2]

To add to this, the card in question uses the Realtek 8139 chipset (looking at the picture anyway), which is the '8139too' driver in the linux kernel.

AFAIK those cards do NOT come with a EPROM slot at all, and the realtek drivers with the cards are first rate.

The only way anything even remotely like what you describe could have happened would be if your winblows OS was subject to something else nasty.

It's windows, I wouldn't put it above doing this being the way that it is (but maybe we should ask those two russians that hacked microsoft before and may have looked at the source?)

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[Mark Pitman]

The Master Boot Record is only 512 bytes. That's not so big. He isn't saying that it put the NT boot loader on his drive. He is saying that it rewrote his MBR to LOOK FOR an NT boot loader.

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[0x0d0a]

I don't know how your boot sector got trashed, but it wasn't the NIC hardware.

I'm *not* familiar with the design that appears on the web page, and I *still* could have told the guy that "the NIC ate my boot sector" is definitely the most improbable diagnosis I've ever heard.

Re:The Dingo Ate Your Boot Sector

[/dev/trash]

But why would it do that? Certainly selling a cheap like that doesn't allow for adding extras like looking for NT etc.

No Surprise

[4of12]

With the way that the functionality of hardware and software is being exchanged, I'm not surprised to see this.

On the one hand you have Winmodems using cheapo crippled hardware with software performing functions that used to be in hardware.

On the other hand, you have modern network cards ready to offload TCP/IP processing from the OS and to do DMA.

Re:No Surprise

[foonf]

Look, Winmodems aren't unique, and considering the power of modern CPUs, they are a very good thing in abstract. If there was an open-source software modem core along with linux support for all of the common soft-modem codecs, I can't see any reason to keep a modem around.

The interface to most modems is a holdover to a time when they were typically hooked up to dumb terminals (hence the onboard command interpreter), and the signal processing required could not be done at any cost except with dedicated hardware. The first case has not been relevant for 15 years or so, and controllerless modems have been around for nearly that long, although they have been saddled with quirky (and proprietary) serial-port emulation and AT command interpreter software in order to act like normal modems. Nonetheless, if you think you see a performance difference between a full "hardware" modem and a controllerless Lucent modem, it really is your imagination, because both have equivalent onboard DSPs.

The second argument ceased to be relevant when CPU speeds were probably 1/10 of what most are now, and that is why full software modems are so prevalent now. Maybe you whine about this, but think about all the things a typical modern sound card does mostly in software (stream mixing, wavetable synthesis, etc.) that any card from 5 or 6 years ago probably would have had hardware support for. Think about how many printers these days DON'T have embedded fonts, PostScript/PCL interpreters, and so on. Think about the complete disappearance of hardware DVD playback cards (and only a small fraction of what these cards did has been absorbed into graphics accelerators). The modern general purpose microprocessor is perfectly adequate for all of these tasks, and it is wasteful and redudant to require special-purpose ASICs to do each of these things, and using a software core allows for much greater flexibility (for instance, you can "upgrade" most 33.6k software modems to support 56k with a simple driver update. Only a few very expensive hardware modems offered any kind of upgradeability, and even then it required reflashing the firmware).

Re:No Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

I would conjecture that modern general purpose microprocessors are also very capable of performing grammar checking functions.

That aside, the whole point of the soft modem is to move DSP functions from the hardware to the software. Soft modems do not have on-board DSP. All a soft modem has is a PCI to AD/DA bridge. There is no other functionality in soft modem hardware.

Re:No Surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

All a soft modem has is a PCI to AD/DA bridge. There is no other functionality in soft modem hardware.

Oh really?. Be careful with your generalizations. That is true of some, but by no means all.

OS Specific Hardware!

[Black Rabbit]

Ever run into a piece of hardware that was OS specific? The most notorious of these, for me, has been the Winmodem, but I have heard that there are Windoze specific printers and other stuff as well. I was bitten once, and ever since then, if they can't tell me if it works on a Mac as well as Windoze, if not specifically Linux, I won't touch the thing!

Second to this, for me, is hardware that is marketed by the chipset, as, for me, these have been typically difficult to find drivers for. Related to this would be motherboards with onboard everything, all with untraceable drivers for their generic chipsets.

It wouldn't be so bad if, when whichever OS can't detect what it is, it installs a half decent generic driver that works reasonably well until the proper stuff can be found. Pet peeves here are generic video drivers that only give you 800*600...or worse, 640*480...in only 16 colours, modems and sound cards that can't be configured, and network interfaces that can't connect.

Re:OS Specific Hardware!

[Jahf]

2 cases of windows-specifism I've had to deal with.

The Xerox WC385 I got from work (funny thing that, since my job at the time was with a Linux server appliance company that has since been consumed) was windows only. Absolutely no non-Windows drivers and no support for standard printer protocols.

The Adaptec 7902 has drivers for many OSes, but they have a special hardware RAID mode (RAID 0 or 1 only, but often good enough) that they only support in their Windows driver. A real pain since the product we are using this in is for a company that is never going to market Windows features, yet customers ask us why the competition (using the same Adaptec chips) has this feature as a give-away and we tell them to buy a RAID card.

*sigh*

Re:OS Specific Hardware!

[MrResistor]

That NIC is certainly not OS specific.

It's got the Realtek 8139 chip, which is probably the most supported Ethernet chip on the planet, which is good since it's on something like 80% of NICs sold. It's well supported under Linux, Win9x drivers are easy to find, and when I put a few of them in some Win2k machines a while back I didn't even have to install them, they just worked without even a "Windows has found new hardware" message or anything.

This is one case where generic is good.

Re:OS Specific Hardware!

[PurpleFloyd]

The reason generic video drivers will only give you 640x480x16 colors is that's a sort of "universal language" for video cards. While some video cards will choke on even 800x600, anything that speaks VGA (that is, pretty much all PC graphics hardware) will run on that standard. The idea is for your system to get to a point to where you can get drivers installed that support all its features.

After all, if your display drivers defaulted to 1024x768x32-bit color, a lot of older video cards would choke and only display a black screen. There might even be trouble with the monitor if you push it too hard (although most monitors are fine and just shut down if you have a wacky scanrate, some will literally emit smoke). If I want to keep a known good video card around for troubleshooting purposes, it shouldn't have to be the latest Geforce or Radeon. I should be able to throw in an 8-year old Cirrus Logic and get some basic diagnostic tools up.

On another note, you may wish to invest in a NIC that is something of an industry standard. I have had great success with the 3com 3c509 (ISA 10mbit) and 3c905 (PCI 10/100). While they are kind of pricey, having a NIC that's supported by most flavors of OS (Windows, Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, lots of others) has pulled my ass out of some rather nasty situations in the past.

Also, with modems and soundcards, if they aren't Windows-only designs that do everything in software anyway, try using Soundblaster and Hayes drivers. Most decent hardware will emulate these; they are more or less industry standards. You won't get much in the way of special features, but it will work unless you have some funky hardware.

Re:OS Specific Hardware!

[rpresser]

We have an aging Intervoice IVR system running on an original IBM PS/2 model 95 - still running OS/2. (Extremely stable, I might add; the only reason we upgraded from OS/2 2.1 to OS/2 Warp 3 was because of Y2K. Less than an hour downtime in the last six months. On hardware from the early 90s.) Not only are the telephone line cards inside it MCA, therefore OS/2 specific; there is an expansion box that supports additional line cards, connected to the PS/2 by an MCA card.

(Okay, you can probably run Linux or BSD on a PS/2. But I seriously doubt you can find drivers for these cards.)

Re:OS Specific Hardware!

[Glonoinha]

I hope you have a few of these machines laying around as spares. I ran into problems once on software that had timing issues ... wouldn't run on anything faster than a 386DX-33.

I can't imagine trying to find a reliable source for replacement parts for a clone 386DX-33 (or slower) so I would hate to ponder the logistics for your MCA box :)

Re:OS Specific Hardware!

[Black Rabbit]

I understand about the need for the basic VGA type driver that will give you enough video to troubleshoot and install the correct driver. But what Windows does with cards it can't detect is to install another generic driver e.g. Generic PCI Display Adapter that will go up to 1024*768 but not at more than 16 colours. This isn't in any sort of emergency mode. Seems to me that, if they're going to do that sort of thing, they do need to take it a little bit further.

Re:OS Specific Hardware!

[duffbeer703]

The problem isn't the card... its the monitor. If Windows defaulted at a high res/refresh rate that would toast someones ancient Packard-Bell moniton, Slashdot headlines would scream "MS Software destroys monitors!"

Yup.

[penguin_punk]

"Has anyone else been bitten by antisocial hardware?"

Yup. Two(ish) words:

Win.Modems

NT boot loader

[PD]

There weren't many details about the network the guy was on, but where did the NIC load the nt boot loader from? Did this thing find and install it from a server somewhere?

Beware the cheap NIC

[Pathwalker]

Once I picked up a couple of really cheap no-brand 10/100 cards that had the same MAC address.

No way to change it either - I guess someone missed the point that MACs are supposed to be unique.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[Jahf]

Yes, but there's no centralized MAC address authority. I've heard of others who have come across identical MACs on a network.

And yes, if you have an OS like Linux (probably *BSD, etc) you can tell the driver to change your MAC address. A pain, but possible. My 802.11b+ethernet router comes with a web interface that lets you do the same (they call it "MAC cloning") so that if you have registered your MAC with your ISP (many broadband ISPs bind to your MAC before allowing traffic from your IP) you can change your equipment without having to call your ISP and have your MAC updated in their database.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

"Yes, but there's no centralized MAC address authority"

Of course there is. It's the IEEE. I know because I shelled out 1600 hard earned dollars for 2^24 MAC numbers. Need their URL?

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[Anonymous Coward]

And you know the best part? With ifconfig I can use your 2^24 numbers for nothing! Information wants to be free!

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[Anonymous Coward]

So, which one are you?

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[MerlynEmrys67]

I guess the IEEE does not count ? Yes, you too can go ieee.org and get your UNIQUE address space

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[Permission Denied]

Once I picked up a couple of really cheap no-brand 10/100 cards that had the same MAC address..

I've seen this three times. Twice with some no-name tulip clones and once with a couple of really old Macs with built-in ethernet.

If you keep the machines on separate subnets, you'll never know about it (unless you record MAC addresses). However, once you put them on the same subnet, mighty strange things start hapenning - one machine works while the other doesn't - seemingly random intermittent behaviour. Really hellish to diagnose. I figured out the Macs pretty easily as they were sitting right next to each other (go to one, ping out, some packets get through, same story with the other one, but try to ping each other and nothing goes through - then I ran a bpf sniffer and it became clear (Macs were running NetBSD)). The tulip clones were in a large i386 Linux environment and were quite difficult to figure out.

Real PITA. Should have recorded the vendor prefix, but I wasn't so wise back then.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[Anonymous Coward]

And I can spoof every one of the numbers you just paid good money for.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[Pathwalker]

The ones I saw didn't have a valid prefix. they both had the same hex digit for all values in the mac address - I think it was EF:EF:EF:EF:EF:EF or some other odd value like that.

I think it may have been a marker, to indicate where the MAC should go in the actual production run, but whoever made the cards skipped that step.

Now that I think about it, there is another part to the story.

There was a dos utility that came with them that claimed to do diagnostics, and let you change the MAC address. When you ran it (even the diagnostics), it would report "no card detected" and that card would be wiped - totally dead, not detectable by any OS in any way whatsoever.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly there was an EEPROM chip on the board. Try to desolder it, read its content, find the EFEFEFEFEFEF sequence, edit it, write it back to the chip, solder it back in. (Alternately you can just desolder the Vcc pin and connect the rest to the memory reader/writer by thin wires while still soldered on. The principle is the same as EEPROM-based unlocking of old Dancall cellphones, google for the detailed HOWTO.)

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[n9hmg]

With ifconfig I can use your 2^24 numbers for nothing!
Yes, on your own network, that's great. If, as he would be doing, since he registered the range, you are selling a product, and don't want your customers to get bitten by MAC conflicts, spoofing MAC has absolutely no benefit. It looks like the manufacturer of the dupe cards cut the expense of proper, coordinated mac addresses. In fact, I'd guess that every one of these cards had the same address. If you're selling to the home user who uses his nic only to connect directly to his cable modem, you can get away with it.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[toast0]

OS's like windows also allow you to change your mac address. I think you can do it w/ macs through the open firmware thing. Depending on your windows driver, you can do it through advanced driver settings, or you may have to poke in the registry.

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[dargaud]

I've been polishing up on my network skills lately, but I don't underrstand the need for IP addresses if all MACs are different. Why don't we just route according to MAC and forget about IPv4 and 6 ? That's probably a naive question, so why not ? Is it only because the routers/DNS would have to remember every single MAC under them ?

Re:Beware the cheap NIC

[identity0]

Okay, I'm not a networking expert but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night(and am taking a class in networking). Here's my somewhat quick explanation:

IP adresses exist so that you can abstract away the hardware on the network. For example, let's say you have a Linux box with IP of 192.168.1.1 and MAC address of XXXX. You can take that box out, and replace it with a Win2k box of IP 192.168.1.1 and MAC address of YYYY. Anything that needed to talk to 192.168.1.1, can still do so without worring about the underlying hardware, or the MAC address having changed. If you rely on the MAC address only, you'd have to change network settings each time you change servers, or even network cards. Using the MAC address would make sense only if there were something that needed to be sent to one NIC, and only that NIC.

Using IP addresses makes networks far easier to organize, too. You can have a network setup where:
Mail server - 192.168.2.1
DNS server - 192.168.2.2
FTP server - 192.168.2.3

...and so on. The addresses are organized, and you don't have to worry about them changing each time there's an upgrade. If you used only hardware addresses:

Mail server - 43HuI87j2H21
DNS server - 5e776uiWE25
FTP server - U089MN5dw2

...and it would change constantly, making networking a huge headache. As an analogy, think about the phone or mail system - you don't have to change your phone # or mailing address each time you change phones or put up a new building on site, as long as no two lines/buildings have the same address. I hope this helps.

es1370

[moncyb]

I bought an es1370 PCI sound card for $20 to replace my ISA one. Works great in Linux, but the Windows drivers cleared the boot sector and erased my BIOS. Is this a new trend for hardware? ;-)

This sucks because my VIA based motherboard has a bug which causes lockups during heavy DMA activity when a ISA sound card is installed. If you have the Linux kernel source, look in Documentation/ sound/ VIA-chipset for more info about this problem.

Took me a while to figure it out. At first I thought it was a problem with a new hard drive--stress testing it would lock up the machine. Once I figured it out, it was obvious. I tested the situtation thoroughly. With ISA sound, lockups, without, no lockups. Who would've thought a sound card can cause problems with your hard drive?

Re:es1370

[Anonymous Coward]

Works great in Linux, but the Windows drivers cleared the boot sector and erased my BIOS. Is this a new trend for hardware? ;-)

Nope, that's about par for the course with Creative drivers.

Re:es1370

[larien]

Hrm, I'm trying to remember the card (I think it was an es1371), but I've had a sound card which would reliably lock up Win98 on bootup. I ended up ditching that card & getting a new one using a different chipset.

promise ide cards

[Meshach]

i bought a promise ide card to add another ide channel to my system and it just shut everything down. i could not boot into anything and removing the device made things no better

caused so many problems that i eventually just removed the card and reinstalled my os

i made sure that my newest mb had the multiple channels for raid built in :)

Evil Memory

[riclewis]

There was a 128MB stick of SDRAM I had once that killed every motherboard I ever put it in. Lost three before I figured it out, and after that I kept it around just to kill old boards.

Anybody want some cheap RAM?

Re:Evil Memory

[SecretAsianMan]

There was a 128MB stick of SDRAM I had once that killed every motherboard I ever put it in. Lost three before I figured it out, and after that I kept it around just to kill old boards.

Hello?! Those don't go in your PCI slots!

Re:Evil Memory

[slaker]

I have a Duron 850 that kills motherboards AND memory. We could start a club!

Re:Evil Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put your Duron 850 on a board with his ram, who would survive! HARDWARE CAGE MATCH LIVE ON PAY PER VIEW!

Re:Evil Memory

[Lukey Boy]

Whoah, modern-day equivalent of sugar in the gas tank.

Re:Evil Memory

[shfted!]

Sell it on Ebay as possessed!

Re:Evil Memory

[aderusha]

i had an mca bus SCSI controller that had the same problem, and the same body count (3 motherboards).

fortunately, they were all mca bus motherboards (ps/2 systems), so no big loss :P

Re:Evil Memory

[Jucius Maximus]

I came across a motherboard that did a similar thing to CPUs. Every CPU that was put in it got cooked. Not fun.

Re:Evil Memory

[darqchild]

Can i borrow that?

my brother needs some "upgrades", i promise i'll give it back when i'm done :o)

Re:Evil Memory

[91degrees]

Reminds me of this story

Re:Evil Memory

[brakk]

A friend of mine had a NIC that did that. He went through two or three of his own mobos and a couple of his friends (I don't think mine ever touched it). He tried to sell it at a swapmeet/sale but for some reason it didn't go. Last I knew, he still had it laying around with a label on it that said "NIC of Death"

$1.99 each?

[rpresser]

I guess you know why now.

Re:$1.99 each?

[nitrobuzz]

It's the price.....It does not matter if it's manufactured by Beer Belly Bob Inc. and made out of cardboard. As long as it's $1.99 you HAVE to buy it.

too bood it wasn't a whore

[larry bagina]

$1.99 to frob your dick? Sign me up!

Re:too bood it wasn't a whore

[Anonymous Coward]

if it can be had for $1.99, you probably don't want it, man...

Power supplies

[Jerf]

Few people seem to realize it, but if you have a computer that seems cursed, suspect the power supply.

My (now) wife's computer was toasting everything over a period of years. It didn't stop until I replaced the case, and thus the power supply in passing.

Nobody ever seems to suspect the power supply if the computer is running, but I suspect that ill-formed power can toast modern electronics.

are you sure your boot sector got trashed?

[AdamBa]

I am wondering if the PXE boot actually got some response from the network, but only a partial one in that it was told in the PXE response what file to load, but then the file did not exist on the server.

You should try it with a network sniffer running...or else try it with the network cable disconnected and see if it behaves the same way.

Also if it happens again, check if the boot sector really has changed. I also doubt that the PXE ROM would have an NT boot sector sitting somewhere that it could burn onto the hard drive (never mind actually doing so).

- adam

ARGH!

[MarvinMouse]

I am understand by obscure acronyms!

GRUB, NIC, SIB, USA, NOB, FSCK, .... !

Will someone please think of the children!

Re:ARGH!

[Anonymous Coward]

FOAD!

Jumping to Conclusions

[penguinboy]

Once that timed out, boot sequence continued to the message "NTLDR not found"! In an attempt to do a PXE net boot, the new NIC had -rewritten my boot sector!-

And you know this how, exactly? Did you try rebooting the machine with the card removed? I had a similar problem with an Intel NIC that wanted to netboot, but fixing the problem was a simple matter of telling the card not to netboot in its BIOS setup. Obviously it wouldn't be impossible for a NIC to rewrite your boot sector (since it's running unrestricted code when the system BIOS initializes it) but it's extremely unlikely.

Are you sure...

[shr3k]

Are you sure that you didn't accidentally leave the driver disk in the floppy drive that was at the top of the boot order?

Back in my younger, unwiser days, I kept wondering why NT 4.0 wouldn't start after I installed the driver (and had to reboot). I drove myself crazy trying to figure out what NTLDR too.

Don't worry. It happens to the best of us. ;-)

Re:Are you sure...

[idontgno]

Are you sure that you didn't accidentally leave the driver disk in the floppy drive that was at the top of the boot order?

This sounds vaguely familiar. I went apeshit nuts for the better part of a morning trying to figure out why a SuSe 8.1 P3 450 in the lab was trying to execute NTLDR (and failing)... until I remembered the driver diskette for the framebuffer in the damn floppy drive. D'OH!

Microsoft OSs: productivity killers even if you don't run them.

But, of course, this doesn't solve the reported rewriting of the MBR, and unless the whole story is a monsterous anti-MS troll I would imagine the original poster would have mentioned the floppy diskette.

I'm puzzled. I guess it'll stay one of the eternal mysteries.

X-Cable

[jsse]

Once I got severe electric shock when plugging a parallel cable to a pretty old computer. I believe I saw a flash of lighting between the plug and the socket before I was bounced back.

The cable has 'changed' internally but no one could tell until one tries to plug it into a live computer - and gets the same shocking experience I had. I didn't throw it away, but mark it with 'X' instead. It becomes 'X-Cable' as in 'X-Men' - it's now possessing super-power after the disaster.

Spare parallel cable? Sure!

Re:X-Cable

[Anonymous Coward]

Try plugging the printer into the same power source as the computer. Getting current flow when running off different circuits is not surprising, but in a house it is usually quite small. However, perhaps some idiot wired the computer or printer to "ground" to the "neutral" prong instead of the round "ground" prong -- thus making it trivial to short 110V through a cable.

Re:X-Cable

[darqchild]

I'm assuming now, that you're in north america, as most of europe doesn't use 110v.

In north america, the neutral and ground wires are connected at some point in the circuit anyway.

To my understanding, this is to provide a refrence point for the hot wires, so each are 120v from ground, as opposed to 120v from the neutral wire.

In a properly wired circuit, there should be no current flow between a neutral wire, and a ground wire.

Hostile CD-ROM

[pruneau]

Well, since I'm doing some kind of family/friend IS/IT support, people turns to me when they want to get rid of their now nearly useless stuff.

So I got this good-looking 8X IDE CD-ROM, which did really stange things on every machine I did try it, whith every possible jumpers settings.

Eventually, I went googling, to find out with the model ID that this beast, even if it had and very-IDE-looking interface, was actually talking MKE, not IDE.

Anybody has a cheap MKE controller around ?

Re:Hostile CD-ROM

[i_am_nitrogen]

MKE stands for Matsushitu Kotobuko Electronics (or something similar to that). Also known as Panasonic. Plug it into the Panasonic interface on any old multi-CD sound card, like the Sound Blaster 16 MCD or possibly Sound Blaster 16 IDE. I've also seen Aztec and ESS sound cards with the Panasonic 40-pin interface. These drives were frequently rebranded as Creative. Sometimes, if plugged into an IDE port, they will randomly eject and close their tray, flash the light, and possibly cause hardware damage or other misbehavior in various components.

I once sold a guy a 4x Panasonic interface CD-ROM for $30. That was several years ago. I shipped the drive, and he never paid me. It turned out that the phone number he gave me was for his previous employer, who didn't know how to reach him, or something like that (don't recall exactly). Lousy Texan thief (I'm not associating Texas with thievery, mind you, he was simply from Texas).

Re:Hostile CD-ROM

[pruneau]

Kewewewewl !!!

Now that you say that it's true, I've got that old ESS ISA sound card with all those stange interface.

Hmmm, let's recompile the kernel with OLD_CD_SUPPORT.

No, really, thank you, I did figure out that MKE was some Panasonic proprietary shmucky, but I did not link that to those old CD farts !

Re:Hostile CD-ROM

[i_am_nitrogen]

Remember that on the Panasonic interface, pin 1 is usually away from the power connector, instead of next to the power connector like IDE.

Why do you bother spewing nonsense?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

"Obviously it wouldn't be impossible for a NIC to rewrite your boot sector"

Obviously you didn't even bother to read a few posts before yours...

The NIC can't run anything. There's no flash or EPROM on it. There's no way for it to force the CPU to execute code. I't can't do a damn thing but perform I/O instructions.

Perhaps you're confusing a piece of hardware with driver software.

Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense?

[aderusha]

perhaps you should open your google before you troll next time... there's plenty of nics out there with prom, and he even mentioned this one tried to pxe boot (which only happens with an onboard rom).

Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense?

[penguinboy]

The NIC can't run anything. There's no flash or EPROM on it. There's no way for it to force the CPU to execute code. I't can't do a damn thing but perform I/O instructions.

Let's read up on PC hardware initialization, shall we?

Adapter cards on the I/O bus can be configured to present an initialization program in ROM memory somewhere in the middle 128K of free addresses. In hex , these addresses are represented as C0000 to DFFFF. Each time the system is initialized, the POST program scans this area for initialization programs and runs any that it finds. This mechanism allows the display adapter to initialize itself properly (no matter which vendor or model of adapter card you own). Code on the SCSI card makes up to two SCSI disks visible and usable to DOS programs. Code on the LAN adapter will boot a diskless workstation from a LAN server.

I guess you aren't entirely wrong: this isn't really 'forcing' the CPU to do anything, since it exists by design.

Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Let's read up?

I've spent the last 25 fsking years designing controllers and adapter cards. I designed a NIC for a fsking PCjr.

I had a PDF of that NIC's controller chip data sheet on my hard drive for over a year. I know it and I know there's no frickin way *THAT* adapter can force the CPU to run code. I'm not saying other adapters can't. They can only if they are designed to.

Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense?

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Read my reply to Penguinboy.

Re:Why do you bother spewing nonsense?

[i_am_nitrogen]

I have seen realtek 8139 NICs with DIP sockets for boot roms. My laptop has an integrated 8139, and builtin network boot support. So does a cheap ECS motherboard I have with integratged everything.

Evil power supply

[lexarius]

I met a power supply once that didn't play nice. When we placed components into the case, the machine would boot and I could install NT or Mandrake, but neither would boot after. After trying just about everything else, I put all the parts into an identical case with an identical power supply. Magically, everything worked. I then put everything back into the other case. Bam. Nadda. I am guessing that it was supplying good enough power to run OS installers, but once it got to loading up the full OS and start up all the hardware and such it would run out of power or start supplying irregular voltages or something. Anyway, we disposed of it as though it were diseased.

I can beat that

[0x0d0a]

I have a *very* old Mac mouse (pre-USB, pre-ADB...I think it uses a DB-9 port or something that looks very similar) that kills motherboards.

Yes, I'm quite sure

[87C751]

No PXE server on my network. Just a Netgear RM356 and a SMC Barricade WAP router that the new card was plugged into. And yes, the boot sector was actually changed. I had to reinstall GRUB to get the machine to boot again, and this box has never had NT installed. (it's dual-boot, but Win98 is the other OS)

I still have another NIC, so I could repeat the experiment. I might, too, just to try to dissect the mechanism at work.

Antisocial Software...

[Bush_man10]

I saw a post earlier that the card couldn't have the ability to wipe your boot record but did you install drivers with it or anything? In the past I am after installing some software on my computer and it screwed my bootsector royally. Check out this old article on slashdot about TurboTax writing to your boot sector. There is some very antisocial software out there and it's not always the hardwares fault :)

My NIC destroys my pci slots

[stinkyelf]

I bought a new NIC (realtek chip) to slot into a spare computer, when I installed it I couldn't get either Windows or Linux to install it correctly (the supplied drivers always failed), the strange thing was that after trying pretty much everything I could think of I put a NIC which had been working flawlessly earlier into the same PCI slot and none of the operating systems would recognise install it correctly.

After sticking it into a couple of slots in both my spare computer and everyday desktop with the same results I put my working card into a slot which hadn't been used and it worked flawlessly again...

TV special

[valkraider]

I can see it now. FOX joins hands with TechTV to start an entirely new line of reality shows:

"WHEN GOOD MEMORY GOES BAD"

"World's scariest hardware installs!"

"Who wants to install a million NICs?"

"American CPU idle"

"Overclocking Island"

"The weakest SCSI device"

and of course, their obligatory sequals, and finally:

"The Torvalds'" ("TOVE!!!!!!!!!!!!")

another story

[Jucius Maximus]

One time, I installed a Lian Li removable HDD bay into my machine. It was physically quite excellent, except that it made the hard drive inside it act like it was doing acid. Every file on the drive that was accessed when the drive was in that drive bay was corrupted, including my PGP private keyring (which fortunately I had saved to a ZIP disk.)

It also messed up that entire IDE channel. The DVD drive on the slave setting was messed up. The BIOS detected it with a garbled name.

After taking that bay out and replacing it with my old HDD bay, everything was back to normal.

old ram modules

[Anonymous Coward]

In the days of yore before SD ram blessed its insightfulness on the land, the earth was afflicted with a dreadful horror: ram slots' grooves and clips. These nightmares of ergonomics shredded every fingernail and finger unfortunate to attempt to operate them.

They are truly the most stupid, anti-social piece of hardware design I've ever seen or heard of.

NICs

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years ago, I got some 10 mhz NICs for $5 each -- which was good at the time. Driver disk included a free virus.

I love Macs, but...

[phillymjs]

...I have to nominate a few models, specifically the machines that were built around the Power Mac 7100, Power Mac 8100, or Power Mac 9500 chassis. With any of those machines, you had to take the whole goddamned thing apart just to upgrade the RAM.

Same with the first few revisions of the iMac before they designed in the easy-access trap door, but the machines above were worse-- I never worked under the hood of one of them without bleeding.

~Philly

Just last night!

[boskone]

friend and I were diagnosing aunt's PC that wouldn't POST (had just changed MB/CPU/mem 3 months ago because it had popped some famous capacitors). He reaches into computer desk to hold it up and disconnect the cables so that we can pull it out. Drops it. I yell at him "why the hell did you drop it?!?!" He says "because it just shocked the crap out of me!".

Into the garbage with that power supply. New power supply in, pc works great. New parts not fried (luckily). My jaw not broken (luckily).

Not the manufacturese fault...

[Jack Schitt]

I had an old AT case (don't laugh... ok laugh) and it had abig fat two state dpdt switch on the front. (remember those?)

i was doing something that required that i remove the wires from it, noting their postion on the switch with a color coded diagram...

somewhere after unplugging the switch and before pluging it back in (about ten minutes later) the diagram i made got rotated by 90 degrees.

I hooked the switch back up and turned it on... bam, all the light in the house go off. I think I heared myself say a very profane word quite loudly.

I managed to find the problem and get everything working, no fried hardware.

See, that's what happens when you wire BOTH TERMINALS of a high voltage supply line through a dpdt switch owned by somebody who likes to experiment...

(Those who are wondering what the hell happened, when the switch was turned on, both terminals on the wall plug were shorted, quickly throwing the circut breaker)

WTF? So you plan to make 16,777,216 nic's? n/t

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

PXE code is in BIOS, not on NIC

[Alex Belits]

...so you have to tell BIOS not to try to boot from the network. Why did it rewrite something, I have no idea, probably you had a server on your network that PXE found.

Case that maims (not kills) motherboards.

[Demon-Xanth]

I had someone give me a case w/ a nice KX450 based PPro motherboard. It has an odd NVRAM error with it. Other than that it works fine. After upgrading my 8KTA3 (KT133A) with a newer DDR capable board, I stuck the 8KTA3 in that case, when the board was on the motherboard tray, it acted like something was shorting, I couldn't see anything shorting, double checked the standoff placement 20 times. Remove it, it works.... with the exception of the POST code feature. That's now dead. But like the 450KX board, everything else works fine. ...bastard!