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I'm trying to play with some voltages using an ATX power supply. I can connect the various wires for the standard combination of voltages, but I need to avoid using the -V wires because they can't hold much current. After googling for a while I found a few examples of HAM radio guys wiring power supplies together to get the voltages they need and using some diodes to prevent the power from flowing the wrong direction and ruining the power supply. SO I wired things up on my breadboard and got smoke :( More googling brought me to CL where I tried to redraw the same circuits and the simulation wouldn't run. Is this a limitation of the lab or do I need to learn more about drawing things here? (Next step is to do a boost circuit, but I don't have any inductors on hand)

This is the simple version of the circuit I was looking at: http://power-topics.blogspot.com/2009/07/operating-power-supplies-in-series.html

I threw a resistor between the load points in the above diagram and then added a voltage meter to verify the result.

what ever happened to Es Is and counting turns?