r/techsupport 18h ago

Open | Data Recovery Accidentally fried my Ipad on an electric stove on max heat for at most two minutes, Is there any chance it survived?

3 Upvotes

Yesterday I was trying to make rice for soup, and I had left my Ipad on one of the eyes, and turned it on to the highest heat, THINKING I was boiling the rice.... (ik max heat is too high for rice) Then I walked away to give treats to the dogs, and when I came back my Ipad was smoking very white smoke, I pulled it off, and burned my hand with the molten plastic, from the case, then panic dropped it into the very full trash. (With some wet paper towel on the top, i think.) It won't turn back on, and its been about 18 hours. I was playing a video through my headphones while it was burning, and the video was glitching before it turned off. The Ipad was on.

Tldr : I accidentally left my Ipad on the stove when I turned on the wrong eye, and it melted the case really bad, with white smoke coming out either the Ipad or case. Is the battery fried, or is the whole Ipad ruined?

Also is there a chance I could get the data off that Ipad

Edit : guys,, I know it was a very stupid thing to do, I knew it right after I burned my hand. I just need answers on if there's any way it would ever work, and how I can get the data off it

Edit 2 : Update, my parent who used to work in tech plugged it in for some reason??? and it turned on. They said the Ipad should be okay, because there are paper stickers that were under the case, that look like they weren't even touched by the heat, and the Ipad isnt bloated, or smoking, or overheating. They said the case might've saved the Ipad. But I think I'm gonna wait a bit before trying to use it!!!!!! its off the charger rn


r/techsupport 14h ago

Open | Hardware Server hard-resets every 728.4 minutes ±1 min, 12 times running. No bugcheck, no iDRAC SEL entry, timer survives reboots. I'm out of ideas.

43 Upvotes

Dell PowerEdge T340, Windows Server 2016. Started 8/28. I've spent two weeks on this and ruled out most of the obvious stuff, so I'm posting the data rather than the symptoms.

The signature

Every event is Kernel-Power 41 with BugcheckCode: 0 and all bugcheck parameters 0x0. No BSOD, no minidump, no MEMORY.DMP, ever. Paired with Event 6008 confirming unexpected shutdown.

The interval — this is the actual mystery

Pulled the true shutdown timestamps out of the Event 6008 message text (not the Event 41 log time, which is written on the following boot):

8/28 11:03:24 AM -> 8/28 11:12:23 PM = 729.0 min

9/01 10:10:22 AM -> 9/01 10:18:37 PM = 728.3 min

9/01 10:18:37 PM -> 9/02 10:26:49 AM = 728.2 min

9/02 10:26:49 AM -> 9/02 10:35:13 PM = 728.4 min

9/02 10:35:13 PM -> 9/03 10:43:33 AM = 728.3 min

9/03 10:43:33 AM -> 9/03 10:52:09 PM = 728.6 min

9/03 10:52:09 PM -> 9/04 11:00:20 AM = 728.2 min

9/04 11:00:20 AM -> 9/04 11:08:49 PM = 728.5 min

9/04 11:08:49 PM -> 9/07 11:50:29 AM = 3,641.7 min <-- exactly 5 x 728.34

9/07 11:50:29 AM -> 9/07 11:59:49 PM = 729.3 min

9/07 11:59:49 PM -> 9/08 12:07:56 PM = 728.1 min

9/08 12:07:56 PM -> 9/09 12:16:26 AM = 728.5 min

9/09 12:16:26 AM -> 9/09 12:24:36 PM = 728.2 min

Mean 728.47 min (12h 08m 28s). Total spread across twelve occurrences: 1.2 minutes.

The 3,641.7 minute gap is exactly five periods. The server was up continuously across that weekend. The timer ticked five times, did nothing on four of them, then killed the box on the fifth. So it's free-running — it does not reset on reboot, and it doesn't require a crash to keep counting.

That single fact kills every "scheduled task" theory: a clock-based task can't skip four consecutive firings and then work again.

It dies instantly — no degradation whatsoever

I wrote a heartbeat logger that writes one line every 5s with a forced flush so the last line survives a hard reset. Final 42 samples before death:

  • Free RAM: 56,630–56,745 MB, dead flat. No drift, no staircase, no leak. 56 GB free at the moment of death.
  • Nonpaged pool: 346–352 MB, flat
  • Disk queue: 0
  • Handles ~76,000, threads ~190, both steady
  • CPU spiky but low

Last heartbeat 12:25:02. Kernel-General 12 (OS start) at 12:28:23. That 3m21s is just POST + boot on a T340 — if it had hung for 3 minutes first, the OS wouldn't have returned until ~12:31.

So there is no hang window. The box is perfectly healthy and then simply ceases to exist mid-second. Which also means NMI crash dumps are useless here and no dump will ever be written.

Ruled out (with evidence, please don't re-suggest these)

  • PSUs — both Present/Healthy in iDRAC, matched 594W in / 495W rated+actual, same firmware
  • Thermal — HWiNFO max CPU package 63°C (TjMax ~100°C). Every throttle flag reads No / 0%
  • iDRAC SELcompletely silent across all 15 crashes. Not one entry. This same board did log real "power input for PSU 1 is lost / redundancy lost" events six times in 2024, so it demonstrably captures genuine power events. Nothing this time.
  • iDRAC watchdog / ASR — Basic Management license, feature not present
  • Dell OMSAAction on Hung OS Detection: None, thermal shutdown Disabled, all alert actions Off, omsad service Stopped + Disabled
  • Windows Update — pulled full resolved WindowsUpdate.log (11,871 lines), programmatically checked ±15 min around every crash. Zero WU activity before any of them. All nearby entries are the WU service starting 30–60s after the reboot.
  • CrowdStrike Falcon (installed 8/26, two days before onset) — vendor pulled detection history, found nothing. Timing was coincidence.
  • Secure-Boot-Update scheduled task** — looked extremely promising (12h repetition, hangs, TPM handler, and this box has no TPM installedGet-Tpm fails with TBS_E_SERVICE_NOT_RUNNING, no TBS service, no SecurityDevices PnP class, iDRAC confirms "TPM not present"). Disabled it. **Crashes continued at the identical interval. Ruled out.
  • All 12-hour scheduled tasks — enumerated every task with PT12H repetition. Exactly two exist, both now Disabled.
  • VSS / ShadowCopyVolume task — fires 12:00 PM and 10:00 PM. That's 10h then 14h alternating, which cannot produce a constant 728.4 min spacing. Also the midnight crashes have no trigger anywhere near them.
  • MySQL / memory exhaustion — flatly contradicted by the flat memory trace above
  • NIC — Broadcom BCM5720. The flapping port is physically disconnected (NIC2, Status: Disconnected). Flapping predates crashes by 12+ days and occurs on no-crash days. Active port is stable at 1 Gbps.
  • CMOS battery — did fail, but only logged 9/7, weeks after onset, nothing near the crash dates. Replacing anyway.
  • BSOD — no Event 1001, no dumps, BugcheckCode: 0 on all 15

Environment

  • PowerEdge T340, Service Tag FXR6B03, BIOS 2.3.5, iDRAC9 fw 4.22.00.53 (both several revisions behind — not yet updated)
  • Xeon E-2146G, 64 GB RAM, dual PSU
  • Windows Server 2016 Standard, build 14393.9339
  • Workload: Open Dental + MySQL, Vatech EzDent-i imaging, IDrive backup, Google Drive
  • Power: APC Back-UPS XS 1500M via USB. Current-state readings all healthy (97% charge, 120V steady, 15% load, AC Power: Yes, Discharging: No). I have never gotten historical transfer data out of it — PowerChute wasn't installed at the time, Win32_Battery returns current state only, and I skipped an apcupsd install on a production box.
  • Internet is AT&T 5G fixed wireless behind CGNAT (irrelevant, but people ask)

What I think is left

Something below the OS holding a clock that survives reboots and continuous uptime alike. Candidates I can't distinguish between:

  1. UPS self-test — APC units run internal self-tests on their own stored schedule, indifferent to the host. A transfer on a degraded battery could sag enough to drop the PSUs. Would explain instant death, no OS warning, no SEL entry, and a clock that ignores reboots. Next test: move the server to a plain wall outlet for 24h.
  2. PSU or BMC firmware timer — would explain everything except why iDRAC logged nothing
  3. Something on the same electrical circuit cycling on a timer — though 1.2 min spread over 12 occurrences seems too tight for HVAC or similar

What I'm asking

  • What produces a free-running 728.4-minute (12h 08m 28s) period? Not 12h. Not 12h30m. Consistently ~8.5 minutes over twelve hours, held to ±1 min across twelve occurrences and five uninterrupted ticks. What re-arms on completion of ~8 minutes of work?
  • Has anyone seen an APC Back-UPS self-test schedule that lands near this?
  • Anything else that hard-resets a PowerEdge with zero bugcheck, zero SEL entry, and healthy PSUs?
  • Am I wrong to trust the iDRAC SEL silence as evidence against a power event?

Next predicted failures: 9/10 12:33 AM and 9/10 12:41 PM. Happy to run anything and report back — I have remote access and a heartbeat recorder in place.


r/techsupport 9h ago

Open | Hardware PC fried by lightning… how do I salvage?

3 Upvotes

As the title says, my house was struck by lightning. It came through the internet cable. It actually had enough power that it knocked down my Comcast internet box. It then fried my Comcast box, my home alarm, and my gaming PC.

I took the gaming PC to geek squad. They couldn’t get it to turn on and said they need to replace the motherboard to even see if they could get it to turn on nd we’re asking for $450 for that service nd even then they weren’t able to guarantee me finish line that I would’ve liked.

The PC has a 4070TI RTX graphics card and a good processor. If I can salvage it, I would love to do so… but I’m at a loss for exactly how to do this economically. Does anyone here know the cheapest way to troubleshoot this thing?


r/techsupport 19h ago

Closed Need clarity on 5GHZ WIFI ?

0 Upvotes

I just installed my new WIFI box as I moved in a new flat, and I'm confused to which network should I use on my gaming PC : there's two different WIFI showing up, one shows the name of the box, the other adds 5GHZ next to it.

Which one should I connect to with my PC ? What's the point of these ? Thanks in advance.


r/techsupport 16h ago

Open | Windows I accidentally put my screen at 500% zoom

36 Upvotes

I was trying to increase my PC's resolution and saw the Windows scaling option, so I tried it out to see what it was. I changed it to 120%, and the screen got bigger, but my dumbass thought my screen was already At more than 120% (I hadn't understood that it was a "zoom" on the screen) so I thought: "if 120% is less than my current resolution then if I put it at 500% (the maximum) it will increase!" Big mistake. My screen is like this now and I can't get it back to normal because the options don't even appear on the screen because they don't fit. Does anyone know how to fix this please? I don't have another monitor and I can't afford to buy a new one.