Dead HDD = a 3DP moment

It’s Saturday eve and I’m sitting down to relax and play some games on my gaming PC. I turn the machine on, get something to drink and ... I see a bluescreen? I tried to reboot, but now I got just the boot sequence and then the dreaded message “insert boot disk en press a key”. I tried and tried, but the 1 year old SSD was completely dead. This couldn’t be true?

All the stores that could have a new harddrive closed an hour ago. Maybe I had something usable in my PC parts drawer? Yes! I found a new 250Gb drive that I never got around to use for it’s intended purpose. I opened up my pimped out gaming-pc and expected to just shove it into some smart holder in the Lian Li case. Nope. Nothing like that. I had a 3 1/2 HDD and a 5 1/4 well to put it in. Bummer. I looked around but couldn’t find any adapter, but then it struck me - I can just print one?

I checked Thingiverse and surely - there was a nice set of HDD adapters there made by MakerCubed. Brilliant! I printed the adapter, screwed it in place and installed Win7. And lo and behold - the screen went dead! Seriously?!?

I looked over all the cables and on the graphics card, one of the two (!) power supply cables were not properly connected? And after going over all the cables, the SSD suddenly started working again? So - there went my Saturday gaming eve. I hope yours was better!

In other 3D printing news - I’m organizing the second 3DP meetup in Oslo in a few weeks and the MakeyMakey-holder I made with Walter (my son) got featured on Thingiverse! Wheee!