Thought I'd share my late night dilemma with you all!
After tinkering with my watercooled dual Xeon system I turned the power button on only to have the fans spin up, no video signal display and the cold, hard knot in the pit of my stomach form as the words 'uh-oh' ran through my mind.
Thing would not turn off, so I had to yank the cord and after several minutes inspecting the machine I could see a few droplets at the bottom of the case. Looking at the bayres I noticed the CD drives were a little wet, no biggie I figured, it's happened once or twice before, unplug them and try the PC again.
Nothing.
An hour later of desperately trying to coax my expensive toy back to life by intermittently pressing the unresponsive power button I decided to get off my ass and reinspect the PC.
To my horror it dawned upon me that if the bayres had dripped water onto the CD drive beneath it and this had dripped down onto the drive beneath that, it didn't take much for the water to drip down the IDE cable to its logical conclusion. My brand new workstation mainboard!
No hairdryer to hand (sister's nicked the thing and taken it with her to uni
) I had to find a quick substitute and since toilet paper was all I could find at a moments notice I employed that. Let me tell you, toilet paper is useless for getting into tiny crevices (no pun intended
so I borrowed my dad's bath spa thing:
This thing blows hard enough to tear a case fan from its housing, and employed on its lowest setting dried my machine out quickly. (is it my coolant mixture or do additives make the coolant a complete pain to dry out since the stuff is almost oily in its consistency and evaporates incredibly slowly?) After spraying the mainboard liberally with ispropyl, and then drying it out again I pressed the power button....
YEA-ESS! the ****er came on!!!!
with a 'too much to hope' grin I checked the bios, the hard disk post, and then after praying for XP to load the system device manager and event viewer. All's good, so far.
Fantastic eh? THE RELIEF!
It's 3am and I would have been lonelier had this damned thing left me high and dry.
Not quite out of the woods yet however, since the mainboard components around the wet area developed a whitish deposit fairly quick. I washed as much off as I could with isopropyl, but it was a pain rubbing it off all the SM components.
Any ideas as to what this residue might be, some corrosion or water residue?
*ahem* to stay on topic, yes, I have had a watercooling disaster, the problem was my own clumsiness in spilling water out the reservoir.