Post Your Biggest Motherboard Mistakes

[hydranix]

Was flashing a BIOS manually from DOS. I was doing it this way because I heavily modified the BIOS to unlock some locked down features and add a less eye-rape splash screen.

All went well the first flash, but i messed up the splash screen. The colors came out awful. Fixed the colors and when I went to reflash it finished the erase cycle, and some point into the write cycle there was a complete shutdown. No warning, just *click*. Since i was flashing the BIOS manually, I was overwriting the boot block for the emergency recovery procedure as well. So this thing was a brick.

A week later I found some free time and located the BIOS EEPROM on the motherboard. it was SMD. When I was desoldering it a bit of molten solder did the most amazing defiance of physics i've even, and wound of on some exposed skin. Ouch. When I recoiled i tore the trace all the way to the Via effectively destroying the board with no practical chance of repair.

Still kicking myself for that.

 

[Pentium4User]

Put my hand in a dell psu that shorted the power supply and the motherboard the amount of angry i have 1 I had the psu open because the fan was acting weird when i try to plug in the psu my thumb touch the negative and positive solder joins the pain was not as bad but the damage caused was

 

[hydranix]

Put my hand in a dell psu that shorted the power supply and the motherboard the amount of angry i have 1 I had the psu open because the fan was acting weird when i try to plug in the psu my thumb touch the negative and positive solder joins the pain was not as bad but the damage caused was

Be glad you weren't a path to ground or you may not have been here to write this today.

 

[Crossvxm]

Recently posted about this, MSI 760GMA‑P34 FX. NEVER touch the shorting jumpers. Any of them. Unless you need to clear the CMOS. For those unaware, the "jumpers" are little black pieces of plastic with a bit of metal inside. They come on certain pins by default. They look as if they were perhaps a leftover bit of a connector that may have accidentally broke off, and removing them can change the MoBo's function and flow. See this guide for example:

http://www.manualsdir.com/manuals/467057/msi-760gma-p34-fx.html?page=24

These little things prevented my system from fully booting. Thankfully I didn't throw the little bit in the trash as I originally intended because something deep down told me to hold onto it. But for an entire day I tried to remove and reconnect all cables, graphics card, and realign the MoBo properly on the standoffs. In a sense this helped me further understand the entire setup of my components and MoBo since this was built for me by a friend.