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0count · 07-21-2003, 07:57 AM

Heh, good stories. Here are a few of my misadventures, from oldest to latest:

#1 Back in early 90's, when I was about 10 or so, just learning to use a PC me and my friend found this neat software on my dad's computer called PCTOOLS. It had an hex editor with it. Well, we decided to take a look at one of the game disks I had and see what the loading program had. To our amusement, we found some messages that were supposed to fire in case of an error and decided to fool around with them a bit. Everything went smoothly, apart from one little thing: somehow we had managed to edit the computer's msdos.sys or something similar. We didn't notice this until the next reboot when the whole system froze. It took my dad a few hours of intense cursing to get the system back to being bootable.

#2 I once used a FAT16 DOS boot disk to do some stuff on an FAT32 windows 98. Don't know how I didn't realize that doing any modifications to the HD would seriously screw things up.

#3 Back when I was doing my first system admin job (and the last one too). I accidentally locked a program in our secondary Linux server. Monday morning, first cup of coffee, locked computer -> writing kill -9 -1 while running as root. Whoopsie.....

#4 A year or so ago, I again did the mistake of trying to make repairs to a computer without having the proper tools (when will I learn?). I had a win98 boot disk and needed to format the C-drive, which was NTFS, rest of my drives were in FAT32 already. Typed in format C to test if the older format would understand the NTFS partition. The format went along smoothly and I thought that everything was fine until sometime later I realized that when windows doesn't recognise a disk, it just skips it. So the "C-drive" I formatted was actually my D-drive. Luckily it only contained installed programs, so I didn't lose any valuable data.

07-21-2003, 07:57 AM	#26 (permalink)
0count Upright	Heh, good stories. Here are a few of my misadventures, from oldest to latest: #1 Back in early 90's, when I was about 10 or so, just learning to use a PC me and my friend found this neat software on my dad's computer called PCTOOLS. It had an hex editor with it. Well, we decided to take a look at one of the game disks I had and see what the loading program had. To our amusement, we found some messages that were supposed to fire in case of an error and decided to fool around with them a bit. Everything went smoothly, apart from one little thing: somehow we had managed to edit the computer's msdos.sys or something similar. We didn't notice this until the next reboot when the whole system froze. It took my dad a few hours of intense cursing to get the system back to being bootable. #2 I once used a FAT16 DOS boot disk to do some stuff on an FAT32 windows 98. Don't know how I didn't realize that doing any modifications to the HD would seriously screw things up. #3 Back when I was doing my first system admin job (and the last one too). I accidentally locked a program in our secondary Linux server. Monday morning, first cup of coffee, locked computer -> writing kill -9 -1 while running as root. Whoopsie..... #4 A year or so ago, I again did the mistake of trying to make repairs to a computer without having the proper tools (when will I learn?). I had a win98 boot disk and needed to format the C-drive, which was NTFS, rest of my drives were in FAT32 already. Typed in format C to test if the older format would understand the NTFS partition. The format went along smoothly and I thought that everything was fine until sometime later I realized that when windows doesn't recognise a disk, it just skips it. So the "C-drive" I formatted was actually my D-drive. Luckily it only contained installed programs, so I didn't lose any valuable data.