We had quite the lightning storm last night, and apparently we took a direct hit. I wasn't home at the time, but my wife described it as "the whole house shook". The burglar alarm went bonkers, making some loud, screechy sound that has nothing to do with its normal alarm noise. My wife pried the box open and pulled the taps off the battery, killing it. Later on, I disconnected the wires labeled "AC" from the motherboard. Technically, I'm renting this box from my alarm company. I wonder who pays for lightning strike damage? Probably me, although I can always say "so, should I call your competition, who'd be happy to install a new alarm for free to have my continuing business?" That would be my aforementioned father's typical strategy.

Other casualties seem to include:

- the telephone in the bedroom (but the bedroom television is fine)
- my Linksys WRT54G router (talks to the inside, but not the outside; DSL modem works fine)
- possible damage to the Mac
--- booted normally
--- after logging in, spent two minutes hanging out without drawing the top menu bar, but did draw the time and a few right-corner icons
--- complained that it didn't know the time
--- after I plugged the Mac directly into the DSL modem, it found the time and appears to be working
- HD-TiVo is utterly dead, not even the fan spins up
- My Onkyo receiver's audio section appears to be dead
--- the front-panel display is fine
--- the relays appear to be clicking haphazardly
--- it smells like burnt electronics
- DVD player and main TV set appear to be fine
- Edit: the cordless phone's base station appears to be damaged as well.
--- The built-in answering machine still plays back messages.
--- The handsets can't find the base station.

This moderately annoys me because I went out of my way to have my TV antenna and satellite dish properly grounded. Of course, maybe the lightning hit was to one of the tall trees next door, and we just got whatever current splashed around. That might explain why seemingly unrelated bits of equipment were damaged.

Anyway, the TiVo, receiver, TV, and DVD player were plugged into a "Monster Power PowerCenter HTS800", which allegedly includes a "$150,000 connected equipment warranty and lifetime PowerCenter™ product warranty". Looks like I'll be investigating how to use that warranty.

Questions for the group:

- Should I do anything in particular to my Mac? Any easy way to check if my hard drives are correcting lots of errors behind my back and it's time to replace them?

- Any experience dealing with Monster about their warranty? I knew, going in, that Monster products were crap, but it was a cheap power strip and the warranty seemed to be more valuable to me than any amount of actual surge surpression.

- What's the current home router / wireless gateway of choice? Still the WRT54G?

I have no advice about the other stuff, but it sounds to me like the lightning came in over the phone line. All the things that you list as being dead were attached to the phone line, all of them directly, other than the Mac, which you say might actually be working properly, and even if it's not, it's only a couple of hops away, the router, again, a scant hop away, and the receiver, which could have easily gotten a surge from the TiVo. The telephones, security system, and TiVo are all directly attached to the phone line, obviously. (I once got a strike this way when the phone company was doing some work and some of the phone lines on the poles outside were nearly dragging the ground.)

Did you run the phone line and ethernet through the surge suppressors? I bet that's the first thing that Monster will ask when you try to make a claim.

Seems to me that this is yet another reason to drop LEC service for VoIP.

I don't have any personal experience with Monster, but I do know the first thing they are going to ask is "Was every cable coming into each of these devices protected?" Like the phone line, cable tv, sat cable, etc... ? Because if you only had the AC power cables protected it could have come in from one of those other lines then jump from device to device thru the AC line.

I would agree with Bitts diagnosis. If you've not already got them then fit surge arrestors to anything that's running outside, TV aerials, Satellite dishes, phone lines, etc. Any insurance claim is likely to go smoother with them in place, maybe you should 'antique' them to make sure it looks like they been in place for a while.

The Monster surge surpressor has a phone line and single-coax filter built-in. I had the phone line running through the Monster, so that's covered. The HD-TiVo has three coax inputs (two from the dish and one from the antenna). For those, the best story I can manage is that everything is externally grounded. The antenna and dish are wired directly to earth ground. Likewise, the coax outputs are run through filter blocks which, themselves, are also wired directly to earth ground. The grounding wire, itself, is something like 10ga solid core.

Also, it's weird that my router is busted, yet the DSL modem (an ancient Alcatel model) it's plugged into is working just fine, and is, in fact, how I'm sending this message.

My current theory, for what it's worth, is that the lightning must have struck near my house, and generated enough electrical noise to turn every wire in my house into an antenna. Some components appear to have fared better than others...

I'm not surprised a piece of old kit survived and something newer went pop. When I replaced an old ISA modem with a modern 56K PCI one I noticed some quite serious over-engineering on the old card especially wrt. the line-side components. It would've been significantly more robust, in fact it outlasted at least 2 machines it was installed in, I only replaced it for a speedier one.

The only way to know for sure about a hard disk is to examine the S.M.A.R.T. logs, and preferably to run a "long" selftest via S.M.A.R.T.

If you can find an Apple or OSX app to do that, then great! Otherwise, boot from a Mac-Linux CD, and run "smartctl -a" and "smartctl -tlong" on the drive.

Cheers

It sounds like the Mac reset the PRAM (where time, and some other settings are stored). The forst boot after this is cleared can take longer, so things on that end are probably fine now. Some things also don't like being set to the wrong time, so that can also explain some of the delays you saw. I'm not sure if Macs are still defaulting to 1904, or if they start at Unix time of 1970 ow when the clock resets.

There are a few ways you can check the disk. First, run Disk Utility and see what the S.M.A.R.T. Status in the bottom right says when the hard drive is selected. Also, open Terminal, and run dmesg to see if any disk errors are showing up there. For a more historical view, open the Console application, and choose the system.log, or archives of it under /var/log. The filter disk should reveal anything of note.

Finally, to do a full disk check, reboot off the Mac OS X install CD 1 (or DVD), and once to the first installer screen, check the menus for an option to run Disk Utility.You should then have an option to verify disk, something that is greyed out when booted to the hard disk.

The Mac diskutil command-line tool says "SMART Status: Verified", which isn't terribly believable. Otherwise, there's the "Disk Utility" GUI app, which just fisnihed 'verifying' the disk with the similarly unhelpful message "volume checked". Verifying the boot disk requires some gymnastics with an OS X boot disk, so I'll deal with that later. (What really matters to me, though, is the secondary disk, since that's where my MP3 collection lives...)

The system log only talks about the usual boot-time things (diskarbitrationd fsck activity).

I'm beginning to think that the only "problem" was that the computer forgot the time and, at least temporarily, didn't have any network to learn the proper time. Do I need a new battery on my motherboard for this sort of thing?

Ugh, good to see there was no damage to personnel....

Heh, those look as if I installed them...

I don't have much constructive to add, I just thought I'd post this picture that I took on friday as it seemed relevant.

Good luck getting everything replaced. I'd reccomend another wrt54g. There is the wrt54gs which might have more ram, and some proprietary speed boosting technology.

Matthew

Probably the easiest way to tell if it needs a new battery would be to shut it down tonight and pull the power cord. If it boots up in the morning not knowing the time (make sure to pull the network cable too), then yeah, you will probably need to replace it. Another way to check will apply to only Tiger, and this might not be true. Anyhow, open System Information, and go under Power. See if it shows anything about the battery there. My Powerbook doesn't, since I know it doesn't have a watch type battery on the system board.

Also, to give you an idea of some bad errors in the system log, this is what my Powerbook was spouting a lot of a few months back:
Feb 20 00:51:50 dragonbook kernel: disk0s9: DMA failure.
Feb 20 03:35:51 dragonbook kernel: disk0: DMA failure.

Turned out to actually be the system board, as the problem persisted with a known good hard drive installed internally. Oddly, it took having the CPU set to highest peformance, and a high stress disk activity to reveal it. No diagnostics could find the problem, but installing World of Warcraft would reliably make the error appear in under a minute. That one had the local service people a bit baffled, since it passed their 24 hour stress testing fine. I'd bet by now they have a copy of WoW to test for problems :-)

Yeah, sorry, System Profiler. And good to know that doesn't show the battery status.

Today, I managed to get a new Linksys WRT54GS (they don't have the 54G any more, and this should be the easiest to set up). I also, after much hunting in Circuit City, found a plain, vanilla, basic telephone. $9.99 from AT&T. What I didn't find is what pisses me off. I've got a snazzy Motorola 5.8GHz cordless with two handsets for which I, at one point, spent big bucks. Now, less than a year later, the newer Motorola parts appear to be incompatible with the stuff that I've got. Looks like I need to go digging around on eBay or whatnot. Google says I can get a "refurbished" model on Overstock.com for $69. Sounds like a good-enough deal to me.

Latest news:

Monster is not rocking my world. I called, asked for customer service, and was shunted directly to voicemail. "Hi, my stuff got zapped while plugged into your thing. I want to use the warranty. Call me." One hour later, no call back.

Also, turns out my computer speakers got fried. I thought I might want to get a pair of those snazzy Monsoon speakers, but the company is out of business. You can find them on eBay, but there appear to be numerous complaints of the "volume puck" failing and leaving the system for dead. Grumble. Any recommendations on computer speakers? I only need a 2.1 system, but it would be nice if it had decent fidelity. I don't need any kind of digital input, since my standard rig uses an external USB sound card.

I've always been a big fan of my Klipsch speakers. I've had them for 6 years now and still going strong. They're solidly built and sound great.

I like my Cambridge Soundworks Microworks speakers. I have the originals, not the model II linked here. Not the least expensive, but they will play very loudly and have good fidelity.

-Zeke

After twisting the Monster receptionist's arm, I got an email address for somebody in tech support who responded after a few hours. Thankfully, he didn't give me any grief about not running my antenna through the surge surpressor, so it looks like I will get covered by them. Apparently, I'll get "fair market value" for my dead amp and TiVo only after an "authorized service center" has declared them beyond repair. There are a few of those in Houston for Onkyo, but for the TiVo? Nothing helpful on the DirecTV web site. After nearly 20 minutes on the phone with DirecTV, the best I got out of them is that they'd offer to replace it for $499 + $14.95 s/h. Now, it's back to Monster...

Well, Circuit City is offering a brand new HD-Tivo for $700 in the store and I've seen it online for $650. The price, in general, has been slashed pretty hard. Maybe they're actually going to get their non-Tivo DVR out the door soon.

Even better: with a one year commitment, they're only charging me $199 to swap out my dead HD-Tivo for a refurbished one. I don't know if this deal is available to new subscribers, but anybody thinking about going HD should investigate. Grumble: I'm talking to my third tech support drone and they're about to ship me off to a fourth drone, since drone number three isn't authorized to do the transaction.

EDIT: Drone number five says that, since it's less than a year old, it's going to be replaced with a refurb free under the original warranty! Wild, huh?

Sorry to drag out a long-dead thread, but I'm wondering how you fared with the Monster policy. I ask because I just had a direct strike to my house a couple of days ago, and lost my TiVo, TV, vcr, dvd player, a/v receiver, etc. It was all plugged in to APC equipment, and they have a similar warranty to the Monster one. I guess I'm just trying to see if these types of warranties are for real.

In the end, Monster denied my claims, but sent me a new power strip. As I was claiming everything else under my homeowner insurance, and was well past my deductible, my home insurance ended up paying the bill that Monster would otherwise have paid, so I wasn't terribly excited to put additional energy into chasing down Monster.

One upside of the whole adventure was upgrading to a GigE switch, which realized a noticeable performance improvement between my file server and my Mac.

Another amusing part of the story: DirecTV shipped me a new (possibly refurbed) HD-TiVo and gave me detailed instructions on how to return my old HD-TiVo, which I carefully followed and kept my receipts. A month later, a $1000 charge showed up on my credit card, ostensibly because I hadn't returned my old one. After much phone calling and faxing, I was able to convince them that I truly had sent back the TiVo. Uggh.

What rationale did Monster use to deny your claim?

Through their unspecified "examination" of my power strip, they concluded that the surge cannot have gone through it, therefor they denied the claim. Never mind that there was no other feasible path. They even made me include a full connectivity diagram of how my equipment was hooked together. Bastards.

In my case, since the plug on my UPS is partially melted, I'd love to see APC actually try to suggest that the surge didn't actually go through it. (see attached pic)

"You could have done that yourself."