Antisocial Hardware?

Posted by Cliff on Monday March 17, 2003 @11:45AM from the it-really-shouldn't-do-that dept.

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?"

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Power supplies by Jerf · 2003-03-17 13:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.