Did i just screw myself?

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yma8

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Ok, i went and bought my self an ide western digital harddrive 160gb.

I got home in the afternoon and immediately opened my box to install it, then i noticed how dusty it is inside so i decided to clean it.
i used a wet cloth and a conventional vacuum. Afterwards, i unplugged all the ide and power cords and put in my new HDD.

On my first boot, it didn't detect any IDE devices, i opened my box again and found that i've plugged all the IDE cords the wrong way. So i corrected that on my second boot, everything was normal.

I got into Windows, i was so tired at that moment(i've being up and working all last night) so i decided to play some games:)P).

after maybe 15 mins, my com froze ... not the first time but very unusual because the game i was playing never froze.

the new harddrive was not formatted yet because i cbfed... anyway i had to reboot the com and because i had my xp CD in the com it went to the XP boot.

so i decided to format the new HDD. However, the installation got jammed at the choose your partition stage... :(

i was pissed, on my next boot, the com stucked at the verifying DMI pool thing.

so i jumped on my gf's com and googled for some solutions... most guides says its because of the IDE cables i have (i plugged the old 40 wire / 40 pins in to the harddrives and 80 wire/40pins into the CD roms.) i know this because on startup it had a msg saying " secondary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed"

i swapped the cords and now the stupid box keeps rebooting when it's done with "verifying DMI pool".

After some more googling i've found an article on cleaning the inside of PCs. On big red font it say "DO NOT CLEAN YOUR MOTHERBOARD WITH A VACUUM!"

did i just screwed all devices inside my com? does anyone have experiences cleaning their pc with an vacuum? T_T
 
I suggest you remove any unnecessary hardware before you jump to conclusions. Leave just the CPU,RAM, harddrive that the OS reside on and video card and boot the machine up. When the computer works properly you can start to add the other device, boot the machine, verify it is working, shut down than add the other device and repeat the process until you stumple upon the non working device.

You shouldn't clean any computer device with any thing wet, never blow on it because you can accidently spit on it. Best solution is to use canned air and apply it from a good lenth but not to close to the system. You should not use a house vacuum on the inside of your computer, use a portable battery powered vacuum at your local computer shop. They are recommended for easy cleaning inside the computer case and do not generate static electricity.
 
you have to be carefull with canned air also, it actually was R-12
, NOW it is R-134a ( same stuff in your cars AC ) TETRAFLOUROMETHANE ....AND it can freeze on contact if the can is accidentally inverted and liquid comes out, freezes components, skin...there was this pc tech in a place I worked once that on fridays he would do dares...and too make a long story short, froze the tip of his tongue with one of those dusters.
yes water is bad...I once blew out a good mainbaord by dripping sweat on the mainboard in the summer.
 
Yea you are right, compressed air can also leave moisture so I highly recommend you be careful and take into consideration when cleaning your system. I never used canned air inside of my system, just a brush with a soft tip to clean hard to reach places.

I have heard smoking near your computer can reduce the system life. I had a friend go through three printers in just 2 year because he refuse to listen.
 
so what are the chances that the vacuum killed my board?

I NEED TO KNOW OH GOD.
 
just plugged in two new IDE cables... the same symtoms... i can boot into flash but it wont read my old HDD.

When i try to boot from the xp cd, the computer stops responding after a few minutes...
 
I do not think it was the vacuum . reseat your ram and try clearing your cmos . disconnect you HDs and cdrom all ide stuff.

DL this program and make the bootable diskette, if you can boot off of this and run the program without errors your mainboard is probably ok, you may have borked your hd or os and that is hanging the system.

http://www.memtest86.com/
 
you may have fried your components with ESD but it is unlikely. i would check that your psu has enough power to power all your devices. is there any chance that while you were tired you accidentaly formatted your boot hdd? because if the drive was blank the boot would probably hang there. can you still boot from cd?
 
unplug the new HDD and run that way see if its working fine. Rule of thumb, if you have problems after installing new hardware, remove said hardware.
 
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