[mythtv-users] shocking hardware issue

James Crow james at ultratans.com
Tue Mar 10 20:13:15 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 15:25 -0400, Josh White wrote:
> One of my frontends has been acting up lately, and today I found a
> disturbing symptom:  I went to restart the machine, by pressing and
> holding the power button (since it seemed to be unresponsive) and as I
> approached the button with my finger, I received what felt like a
> static shock, and the machine reset, without my actually touching the
> machine at all.  
> 
> When the machine booted, it said had lost he BIOS settings, and I had
> to press F1 to adjust my settings, or F2 to run the defaults.  The
> case is an Antec Fusion (silver), and it uses the stock 400w power
> supply that came with it.  Until now, the machine has behaved
> normally.  I did recently add a tuner card to the machine, which has a
> coax analog cable cord connected to it.  In addition to the tuner
> card, I have a PS/2 keyboard, USB mouse, Cat 6 network wire, USB
> Windows MCE remote receiver, and a normal power cord connected to it.
> It connects to my TV with a RGB TV-out from an 8400GS card, and
> stereo, analog audio. 
> 
> I have little reason to believe there is a probelm with the ground
> wire (in the wall outlet), but could this be a first symptom of that,
> or perhaps an issue with the powerstrip it's plugged into?  
> 
> FYI, the machine did boot fine after this, and seemed to work.  The
> only symptom I had noticed before this is that my remote control would
> seem unresponsive, and then minutes later, would suddenly act on all
> the input I had tried to give (like to skip a commercial; nothing
> would happen during the commercial, but a few minutes into the next
> segment, it would skip ahead as though I had pressed the forward
> button several times).  
> 
> Any thoughts? 

It is possible to get a voltage potential from the coax shield of a
cable line. I have mine grounded at each wall jack because I would
occasionally get a small shock from the coax. It also helped with an
audio hum by an old non grounded TV.

Cheers,
James



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