As Brendan Fraser says in The Mummy; “This keeps getting better and better”, and as Homer says in The Simpsons; “in case you didn’t notice, I was being sarcastic!”

This evening I was attempting to mount my laptop hard drive into my old desktop machine (a PII, 300) to see if I could get any data off it. When I plugged the machine in and tried booting it up – I heard 2 loud pops, followed by a small cloud of smoke, so I knew something was wrong :). I checked it out, and sure enough, my power supply was blown. You can see to the right (click for enlargement) and also in this picture that the middle of the power supply was covered with the remnants of one of the diodes (?transistors?) that exploded. Messy.

So now on to plan 2 – I’ll take the drive to work tomorrow and see if I can get a chance to try mounting it on my machine at work instead, which I know is stable and operational at least, and which has network access to plenty of storage and a CD burner if I need it 🙂

More later.