Plugged USB cord into laptop and I think it fried something

[NathanVos]

Hello,

I have an interesting situation with my laptop. I think I unwittingly killed it. It is a Lenovo G500, that I got for a good deal last year. The warranty is just expired. The issue began with an old Power Macintosh 5400 (circa 1996) with files on it I wanted to get off.

I tried networking that computer to my desktop PC using Vmware and a copy of Mac OS X. That did not work, so I had an old PCI Firewire card laying around that I installed in the old mac. I got a firewire to to usb adapter off of Ebay, installed the firewire end into the powered on mac, and as I proceeded to plug the usb end into the Lenovo laptop, the laptop instantly turned black. Which by the way if this was a really stupid idea in the first place, I kind of would like to know the technical reasons why, for educational purposes or for someone else not to make the same mistake I did.

I could not get it to turn on. I took out the battery and tried to to get it to start the AC way but that did not work. No lights. No sound. I took out the ram. Nothing. I pulled the SSD and checked it. The files are intact as is the secondary hard drive installed.

Now with the battery installed and plugged into the wall I get the battery is charging light and if I unplug it that battery charging light goes out, but it still does not turn on. And I mean no fans, lights, nothing.

I took it apart and I do not find any char marks or smell on the motherboard or near the USB port. I have the motherboard out and the computer disassembled now. My guess is that the PCI on the Macintosh 5400 was putting an electric charge out that traveled through my USB in the laptop and cooked the motherboard somewhere or the CPU (I'm guess the 5400 was angry that I woke her up from her deep slumber).

I was wondering what anyone's thoughts were. If they do not think it is the motherboard or the CPU, I am all ears. If it is possibly one or the other, I was wondering what people thought it generally might be, the CPU or the motherboard or both? I didn't know if the USB was a direct electrical path to the CPU or not. Since I spent $400 to buy the laptop, and it was my fault, I would be willing to resurrect the old girl. The SSD if fine. It has WIndows 10 that would probably work on the same replacement motherboard, and I have spare RAM if this laptop's is burnt out. So $200 and change would probably fix this costly mistake if I had to buy a motherboard and CPU.

Thanks

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi

If i under stand you the object was to connect a old Mac to a pc using a firewire to usb adapter then usb cable

It is (fairly well ) known that connecting a firewire plug to usb cable burns out the motherboard

Most people would consider connecting using network cable (assuming Mac has a rj45 network port)

(Going via a switch or using a cross over network cable)

An alternative would be a external hard drive with both firewire and usb ports
Then using windows software that can read mac formatted disks

There are usb to usb network cables with a blob in the middle containing some components and memory holding the usb networking drivers which can be used to exchange data

I hope you can find a working motherboard for the lenovo laptop at a reasonable price and nothing else is burnt out

The hdd can be tested easily assuming sata connectors
The cpu requires a working motherboard to test it
So dim Ram can be tested in a suitable laptop with
Matching ddr-2 or ddr-3

Regards
Mike barnes

 

[NathanVos]

Hi

If i under stand you the object was to connect a old Mac to a pc using a firewire to usb adapter then usb cable

It is (fairly well ) known that connecting a firewire plug to usb cable burns out the motherboard

Most people would consider connecting using network cable (assuming Mac has a rj45 network port)

(Going via a switch or using a cross over network cable)

An alternative would be a external hard drive with both firewire and usb ports
Then using windows software that can read mac formatted disks

There are usb to usb network cables with a blob in the middle containing some components and memory holding the usb networking drivers which can be used to exchange data

I hope you can find a working motherboard for the lenovo laptop at a reasonable price and nothing else is burnt out

The hdd can be tested easily assuming sata connectors
The cpu requires a working motherboard to test it
So dim Ram can be tested in a suitable laptop with
Matching ddr-2 or ddr-3

Regards
Mike barnes

Hey, thanks for the quick reply. Well, I had tried the Ethernet route but I couldn't get the computers to recognize each other. The Mac OS X on my pc through Vmware wouldn't recognize the 7.6 HFS system on the Mac (I think they abandoned HFS for HFS+ in the late 90's). I had a PCI ethernet in the mac previously. I had never dealt with firewire, I just thought it was a platform for data transmission like USB so I thought plugging the two would get a connection. Looking back, I could have pulled out the IDE mac drive, connected it to a IDE to USB adapter and got a program to read the HFS files, but that is hindsight.

Really I was concerned about the laptop more so than how to get the files off of the Mac. But thank you for the input. So your vote is probably the motherboard? I guess I could always buy both the CPU and a Motherboard and return the CPU if the motherboard fixes the issue. Any thoughts on that?

 

[NerdIT]

You will need a crossover patch cable in order to hook the computers together and communicate. A regular "straight-through" Ethernet cable wont work (on these machines at least, to old to "auto-negotiate" speed and duplex) These are cheap and/or easily made. Connect, give each machine a static IP in same subnet, and you should be able to communicate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_crossover_cable

If you did fry it.. ;( I would bet my last dollar that the CPU is fine and the MOBO is bad -that is if it is blown.

Anyway to check and verify the Power Supply?

 

[NathanVos]

It was the motherboard! 110 dollars later, she fired right up. Thanks for the help. I'll look into the cross over cable. It looks easier than what I did. What I did do was pull the hard drive out of the Mac and hooked it up to a IDE to USB and read the files that way. I learned an important lesson though. Just because Ebay has an adapter for something doesn't mean the two things were meant to plug into each other - like firewire to usb...