ddrescue, one of my favourite tools

A Dell GX270 PC which ran for a few seconds, then shut itself down.

Initial thoughts were that something was wrong with Windows, so maybe we need to repair it’s boot files. Before attempting any sort of repair work it’s wise to take a copy of the hard disk; I find the ddrescue tool is a great way of doing this, plus it highlights any faults with the hard disk itself (see photo). On large disks this takes a bit of time, but we can get on with other jobs while this is happening, and I won’t charge you for this 🙂

Having taken a copy of the hard disk, it gets put back into the PC. At this point I spot what it probably the actual problem, some capacitors on the motherboard which have burst (see the brown gunk on top of the centre one!). On the photo they are the round components; the three in the foreground are OK, but the whole row of others (top right of photo) are damaged.

Second photo showing the new components soldered in place. They’re slightly larger than the old ones because they have a higher rating (less likely to fail again), which explains why a few of them don’t look completely straight. (but from a functional point of view they are a direct replacement for the broken parts)

I charged £20 for this (£15 labour, plus £5 for the components).
My guess is that the components had failed due to excess heat, and the customer agreed that due to the positioning of the PC this was probably true, and that they would find a better place for it.