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The Blackbird Crashes and Burns

I got my HP Blackbird PC way back in 2008, while we were living in Singapore. It was a state-of-the-art system when I got it and has to be the coolest PC ever. It's mechanical and thermal design is exceptional. I really fell in love with that system. When we moved back to the US it was damaged in transit. The shipper had actually run a forklift through it! Instead of just buying a new PC, I shipped it back to HP and paid them to get it repaired.

Gaming is a demanding application though and PC technology changes quickly. After a few years even the hottest gaming rig is out of date. Rather than replacing my Blackbird, I upgraded it every few years. Fortunately when I was at the University of Idaho, I worked with my friend Ivan who is a PC Master. He helped me do the upgrades (translation - he did all the hard work). In 2012 the Blackbird got a major rebuild. I got a new, top-of-the-line Intel processor with faster RAM. That required a new mobo as well. I got a high end video card, a rare choice of a Radeon chipset since I am usually a fan of nvidia. It was capable of driving my new 30 inch WQXGA monitor (2560x1600 resolution). I also switched to an SSD drive for the system disc, to speed up the whole system. Then to handle all the new electronics, I got a larger power supply. I pretty much replaced all the of the insides of my Blackbird. That was a big project but it was a lot of fun. It was well worth it too as my Blackbird was smokin' hot again.

In 2016 I added a 4K monitor and needed another graphics upgrade. With a new nVidia-based card, the Blackbird could drive a dual monitor setup that included the 4K display. I expected to last me for a long time. I figured that I wouldn't be getting a higher resolution monitor for quite a while. Even though games keep improving their graphics, I don't play shooters or other games that are really demanding for graphics. I figured that I would be set for quite a while.

Unfortunately, this year my Blackbird got sick. It wouldn't shut down properly and when power cycled it wouldn't restart unless it sat for a while - like an hour. It sure seemed like a power supply problem so I pulled out one of the three hard drives. That reduced the load on the power supply and made it better. But over time it seemed to slowly deteriorate. I figured that I needed to do some serious troubleshooting or else replace it, something I was loathe to do. I consulted with Ivan via email (he moved to Utah a while back). Since he was going to be in Boise visiting family over the holidays, he offered to come by for a debugging session.

Ivan suspected the big electrolytic capacitors on the power supply were causing the problem. Sure enough, when we took out the power supply and opened it up, it looked like some of the caps had failed. That was actually a good thing since the power supply was about the easiest thing to replace. I went online and found a replacement at Best Buy that was in stock. A quick trip and an hour later we were back with a brand new power supply. Both the old and the new power supplies had modular cabling so we just had to replace the power supply itself. We unplugged the old one, left all the cables in place, and plugged in the new one. Pretty soon we were ready to fire up the system with the new unit. Easy!

Except that it wasn't. The system wouldn't boot. After some troubleshooting we found that the cabling wasn't so simple. Although the two power supplies had identical molex connectors, the pinouts were different in one case. The Blackbird has a backplane for the hard discs that allows hot swapping of the drives. Unfortunately the cable to the backplane had the wrong pinout for the new power supply and we had twelve volts on the five volt line. Not good! In fact, pretty much a disaster. We figured that we had fried all the electronics on the disc drives.

And that was the end of our attempt to fix the Blackbird, at least for that day. The next day I started shopping for a replacement PC. That is a subject for another post.

We couldn't just give up though. Ivan took the Blackbird home with him. He had a better setup for troubleshooting there. A few days later he took apart the disc drives and sent me photos that showed the damage that we had done to the circuit boards. He was optimistic though. The hard drive backplane was ok and he said that he could make the correct cable to connect it to the new power supply. Then I would just need to get a new hard drive and the Blackbird should be ok again.

Although it was badly hurt we resolved to do what we could to fix the Blackbird. It wouldn't be my primary system anymore but we couldn't just leave it like this either. Besides, Ivan and I had a lot of fun working on it even if it didn't turn out well. It was just like old times when we were working togethr in IT at the University of Idaho. We would bring the Blackbird back to life and it would be a fun project.