[AccessD] Ya know they tell ya to remove power...

A "funny" story with a happy ending.

I was working on a new server I am building for doing a VM.  All done, working well.  I had an iRam 
card which is an old card which holds up to 4 gigs of RAM and turns it into an SATA 1 hard disk.  It 
works fine with vista and previous but it does not work with Win7 and 2008 clean installs. 
Apparently they just don't have drivers to make it happen.

So I removed the iRam, which was in a PCI slot and I neglected to put the little metal tab in the 
back to cover the hold in the back panel where the card screwed down.

The next day I decided to install an Areca 1220 I had laying around.  The Areca is a PCI Express 
card.  Not watching what I was doing I tried to insert it into the slot adjacent to the pci express 
slot which happens to be PCI.  The computer *turns on* and I start smelling that sickening smell of 
toasted something.  Since I am installing an Areca 1220 I assume that the toasted something is a 
$450 Areca raid controller card.

I quickly yanked the card out and turn the computer back off.  I then *remove the power*... and 
decide what the heck, let's see whether I actually fried the Areca.  Looking closely at the card I 
notice a connector trace on each side burned.  My guess is that these two traces are shorted 
together on the PCI Express but are power / ground on the PCI.

As it turns out the Areca was otherwise undamaged, just a couple of connector pins seriously 
overheated and damaged.  My motherboard wasn't fried.  *Very lucky* all in all.

Ya know they tell ya to remove power...

-- 
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com