woke up and my computer didnt want to work. i think it had something to do with my makeshift fan repair the other day. i figured the problem was with the potentiometer that controlled the fan speed (analog fan control, in a computer, lol), so i clipped the wires and twisted them together and put some tape on it, and this seemed to work, the fan turned at full speed. 2 days later and my rig didnt boot. i thought maybe i had inadvertently caused an electrical problem. so i disconnect the fan and booted, came back up normally. so i tested the pot in question, its range was between 120 and 10k ohms, unusual for a potentiometer. so i soldered a resister to mimic the potentiometer at its minimum value (this causes the fan to turn at full speed), applied some heat shrink, plugged it back in and rebooted. didnt work!
so exploring other avenues i plugged the drives into another controller and changed the boot order in the bios. i also left the fan unplugged because at this point i dont trust it. system boots. i assumed that maybe the drive controller is bad, and figure this will work for now. so i sugt down hook the fan back up and close the case, and i boot the rig. no boot! ****!!!

now on the other end of the fan's pass through molex connector is the connector for the leds int he front panel, purely decorative hardware. on a hunch i unplug the thing. system boots! i try it again, system boots!, i change the hard drives back to the way they wore, system boots. aparently the way i hot wired my fan earlier must have caused damage in to the circuitry in the the led board. so i just left the thing disconnected, ran some diagnostics, scanned my disks, the rig snows no signs of there ever being a problem.
hopefully i will be able to build a new rig soon, not sure if i can get another year out of this one.