I’ve recently had bunches of hardware problems at home — every stinkin’ system that I own (except my Thinkpad) has an issue.
The one that ticks me off the most is my MythTV system. I built it myself, in an Antec Overture case with a Tyan dual Opteron board, running a single Opteron 246. The thing is beautiful, and served me well for almost a year.
The system disk started to have unrecoverable errors, so I was already looking at it pretty closely. I had started to move data around on the disk to avoid the bad area when the DVD+RW drive stopped working. That was too much of a coincidence — neither of these devices were near their MTBF — so I opened up the case and started to look around. Seeing nothing unusual, I tried to power it up again. Hmmm… Nothing.
So I did what any engineer would do: unplug it, reseat the components, examine it closely, and try it again.
Holy crow! I can only describe the next sequence of events as “a catastrophic power supply failure”. There was a very large arc, and a very small ball of plasma. Given this, I’m just going to assume that the entire system is compromised and start from scratch…