"Carol Shenkenberger" bravely wrote to "Wayne
Chirnside" (13 Mar 05  14:52:16)
 --- on the heady topic of "Plz Listen to this"

 CS>  For me, it's the floppy
 CS> drive. I've plugged those ribbon cables in backwards a dozen times in
 CS> the past. The connectors *now* make it very hard or impossible.  That
 CS> did not used to be true.

 CS> Here's a really neat trick!  Take an old computer (386 era) and swap
 CS> out the power supply then forget the 'balck meets black' rule and plug
 CS> in the leads backwards to the MB.  Now, also get the wires to the
 CS> on'off switch backwards.  This will isolate the fault to the pole
 CS> outside your house where you get to watch the guy come up with a truck,
 CS> climb the pole, and reset the breakers so your block has power again.
 CS> Really neat trick!  I was told not to try it again though for some odd
 CS> reason.  Is that fair I ask you?
 CS> xxcarol

Some 3-1/4" floppy drives were very unforgiving of being plugged in
backwards as were some older Miniscribe HD's. I let the smoke out of a
few of those. Don't ask... grin. Luckily at the time the HD was an
easy fix as only the I/O chip fried and I had one on hand from a
scrapped head crash unit. No data lost. The floppy wasn't so lucky as
it was a large LSI smd pkg. I never had the serendipity to wire the
power switch backwards so you're one up on me but did have a main
electrical box explode spectacularly!  ;-)

 M*i*k*e

... Never trust a man who can count to 1,023 on his fingers.
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30