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Spark flew from my firewire port, computer shut down...

M

MVApple

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 18, 2008
527
1
Ok so I did something pretty stupid. I wanted to transfer some files from my pc to my mac over firewire and I had a firewire cable....except it was a firewire 400 cable.

I didn't know the difference and I took the cable and said, "this isn't it, is it?" So I placed the cable this mini firewire 400 cable there and a spark literally came out and the computer shut down.

I press the power button and it boots up but it doesn't recognize the battery. So I shutdown open it up, remove the battery and put it back in. I boot up and it works. I've tested pretty much everything I can think of and it all works fine.

Anyone ever experience this before?
 
TuffLuffJimmy said:
:eek:

You put a mini 400 connector in a full size port?
Click to expand...

Not exactly. I put it on the port to see if it was the right size. I didn't push it in but the contacts touched and the spark flew.

I just noticed one thing. I have a backup copy of pirates of the caribbean 1 and my backup no longer works. The same movie works in my windows laptop though and it did work before on my mac. Every other disc I throw at the mac seems to work though so not sure what to make of it. Even my backup copy of bonus features of pirates of the caribbean 1 works and they were made on the same computer, same drive etc.

*edit*

Ok not every disc works. Now the superdrive is giving me problems =/

I put in the pirates 1 movie again and it loaded, then I tried the features disc and it did not load. Occasionally it will load discs now, seems random. I noticed it plays a 3 note tone and discs seem to be taking 10-20 seconds to load up. Do the super drives usually take that long? And is that 3 note tone it's making normal? I'm a new mac user and I didn't have a chance yet to use the super drive extensively so I'm not sure.

*edit*

I tried the original discs and they work perfectly. They only take about 5 seconds to load and theres no musical tone. I'm thinking my super drive is fine, but Apple just uses a crappy drive?
 
BACK UP. Backup immediately, right now. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars, go directly to backup your system.
 
motulist said:
BACK UP. Backup immediately, right now. Do not pass go, do not collect 500 dollars, go directly to backup your system.
Click to expand...

In case the OP isn't totally sure after this comment, back up while your computer still turns on. Shorting it is bad news.
 
This just happened to my brand new MacBook Pro! What ever happened with your case? Does the firewire still work? Was the battery affected in any way? Did you see "Check Battery" for its status and is there a way to make it go away?

20 years of using Macs and I've never seen anything like this. Why would anyone ever build a port that could do such a thing!? I can understand bad things happening if you FORCE a connection, but simply touching the cable to the port makes the firewire spark. That is not cool.
 
sliderule2167 said:
This just happened to my brand new MacBook Pro! What ever happened with your case? Does the firewire still work? Was the battery affected in any way? Did you see "Check Battery" for its status and is there a way to make it go away?

20 years of using Macs and I've never seen anything like this. Why would anyone ever build a port that could do such a thing!? I can understand bad things happening if you FORCE a connection, but simply touching the cable to the port makes the firewire spark. That is not cool.
Click to expand...

In case you didn't heed the advice given in the old posts, then it bears repeating. Before you do anything else at all, you should backup your hard disk immediately.
 
sliderule2167 said:
This just happened to my brand new MacBook Pro! What ever happened with your case? Does the firewire still work? Was the battery affected in any way? Did you see "Check Battery" for its status and is there a way to make it go away?

20 years of using Macs and I've never seen anything like this. Why would anyone ever build a port that could do such a thing!? I can understand bad things happening if you FORCE a connection, but simply touching the cable to the port makes the firewire spark. That is not cool.
Click to expand...

Hey slide, sorry for the late reply. I just found this in an email I dont check too often and I didn't even know this thread was still alive. I never really found out completely if I did something to damage the computer. I was still within my 30 day warranty period and a bit after it happened I tried to use the dvd drive and it wouldn't work properly. Basically, it would have a hard time reading any disc I put in it. I got it exchanged from amazon.com (where I bought it) and that was the end of that. It's possible I damaged the drive with my incident, but its possible the drive was simply bad from the start. I never got the chance to try it before the incident so I never found that out.

This happened to someone else too. I lost the thread so I never found out if he had any problems afterwards.
 
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