For everyone who really wants to know....
He's not joking. I really did knock a light (a swing arm lamp) into the chassis of a computer.
Interestingly, the mobo itself was un-harmed (and I'm still using it - it's a Pentium I ), probably because it was on plastic stand-offs.
However, the video and HDD died. One of the Ram chips popped (ie, the plastic blew off) on the video card.
More interestingly, some of the address/data lines died on the HD. When I tried to recover stuff from
it via linux, I could read the drive (though the geometry was wrong).
A dd (disc to disc copy) to another drive showed repeating blocks from the drive, which is how I know
some of the address lines died. And when I examined the copy, some of the bits in the data were consistantly
wrong. I used a hex editor to view the dumped copy against a hex edit of a standard windows HD. By comparing
the two, I could see which bits were consistantly wrong. At that point, it was not worth trying to recover.
Yes, the lamp and the computer were on the same power strip. Apparently the power strip was not quick enough, as this accident blew the fuse in the main fusebox. Don't know if a GFI would have helped, but I'll keep it in mind.
And needless to say, the lamps around my work area are now florescents - I hope they won't fry anything if I do it again
And thanks for all the offers of help. Fortunately, I have probably a half-dozen or so computers floating around in various states of repair. When something bad happens to one, I can usually salvage what I need from another one.
Since I use XP for building this stuff (Anything higher has problems with HuC), offers of newer computers won't help. Most won't run XP, anyway. At least, not the ones I've tried.
For the record, though, I used to do data recover on a semi-professional basis for a few companies in the area. When drives 'died' people who worked there and knew me would bring them over, and I and a few friends would have a go at them. Out of about 20 drives, there was only 1 we couldn't recover 90%+ of the data from. The professional place they sent that drive to charged them $2K, only to tell them the head had come loose, and there was nothing they or anyone else could do, because it destroyed the platters while bouncing around inside the drive.
That's when I quit doing it for fun.
