Latch

What are some things that, now that you look back at them (hopefully smarter), make you want to kick your own ass?

Only computer stories please (hence it being in this forum). Hopefully we'll learn from each other's mistakes while laughing at some of the shit we've done.

Two from my (seemingly infinite) list:

#1. Back in the days of DOS and Win 3x/OS/2 2.x (whatever: pre-win95), we had a nice little 386 with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 on it. Now me, being an inquisitive little shit (and going for privacy at an early age hehe) found a program that would require a password to go on the computer. HOW COOL? (Can we see where it's going?) Nevermind that it was a family computer, and that this program just ran at the end of your autoexec.bat file... I didn't know that stuff. All I knew was that it allowed me to control access to the computer. Very cool. So I install the program (remember pkunzip's command line options anyone? hehe) and promptly type in a password, reboot and see it in action.

Blank screen, with just "Password:"

Cool.. but wait.. my password doesn't work. Let me try again... nope.. hmm, maybe this key was capitalised.. nope.. oh shit.. it locked my machine.

At this point I get that sinking feeling that you get when you realise you've just majorly fucked something up (you know the one). I realise I have to go tell my dad I destroyed the computer and we can't get in anymore. I go explain it to him, and he (surprisingly) remains calm and thinks he can fix it. He goes to the computer, asks me what I set the password as, and ends up locking the computer again (a reboot fixes that, btw.).. This is where he gets mad. I didn't know the F5/F8 trick at the starting of MS-DOS, and I knew more than he did about that kind of stuff. We end up calling some guy who is able to tell us how to get around it (F5.. so simple).. and explains how to delete the line out of our autoexec.bat file. Damn I felt stupid.



#2. A few years later I get my hands on OS/2 Warp v3 (sweet!).. we now have a 486/80 or something like that. I have the old 386 sitting there too, trying to network these two machines via some old network cards to get data from one computer to the other. Now you have to imagine the scene, I'm semi-lazy/impatient, so I have both computers open and laying on their sides next to each other. For some reason I have a power cord from the power supply in one computer running to a hard drive in the other computer. It's a pretty dodgy setup. The network cards are ISA. I have the bright idea of pulling a network card out while the computer is on and swapping it to the other computer (don't ask me why.. can't remember the reason). So I pull on the isa card... it's screwed in.. son of a bitch. Unscrew the bloody thing, and the network card comes out.. with a giant POP.. computer screen goes blank.. and I start smelling this arcidic (correct word?) smoke smell. I freak out and pull the power cord out of the back of the computer and panic, thinking I just ruined the computer. I go.. wake up my dad (it's probably 11:30-midnight when I'm doing this in my room) and in a panic explain what happened. He says "we'll discuss it tomorrow" and goes back to sleep. I go back in the room and look at the computer for a minute.. but can't resist. Right back to it I go, and find out I only fried the ISA slot on the motherboard. I was very lucky for being so stupid. My dad wasn't pissed off the next day, by the way.

So those are a couple of my stories (a bit longwinded.. but yeah). What stupid things have YOU done?

TwistedFate

I can't even begin to tell my stories. I just don't know where to start.

I can tell you that most of mine involve some form of massive data loss and me telling myself "Don't ever do this again, stupid" while bashing my head against a wall, at the end.

I do have a similar 'password' story. I was using a top of the line (at the time) 386-40 and was concerned that my dad was snooping around it when I wasn't at home. So I enabled the BIOS password setting and rebooted to test it. I neglected to look for somewhere to set the password to what I wanted it to be. So here I am with a locked computer, at the BIOS level with no fancy F5 tricks for me, and no idea what the password was. So I puzzled over it for a while trying a few possible passwords to no avail. Being a nerd I had plenty of nerd friends to call on, but none were at home. Finally in a stroke of genius I tried '1234' and SUCCESS! I immediately turned off the password feature and wrote a logging program instead.

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Boner

Let me see... Several years ago I did a rm * in / on an AIX box. I recovered by copying the missing files from a similar machine.

The biggest one that I regret was a mistake I made when trying to change a partition from Linux ext2 to ReiserFS. My machine was dual bootable between W2k and RedHat. I had fdisk'ed and forgot to reboot before formatting the partition. I ended up wiping the NTFS partition that contained tons of original digital photographs, some of my daughter right after she was born. I would have rather lost my machine than those pictures.

juanvaldes

Just a month ago this happened.....

I had gotten both XP & Linux to dual boot just fine, but XP was the default and I wanted to change it. No prob, I've done this before, go in and edit lilo.conf. Well, I edited it alright and forgot the link telling lilo where the OS is (what partition). So when I rebooted and went into linux it would just kernal panic during boot. Couldn't edit the file from XP so I ended up reinstalling linux, on the bright side there was nothing of value lost just a few hours.

My only other story was in the late 80's, we had a mac Plus and I still couldn't read. When you shut those systems down it said "It's now safe to turn off your Macintosh" with a button to reboot. Now we turned it off at hte power stip. Not knowing what hte message said figured I was supposed to hit the button as I flipped off the power. Amazingly we NEVER had any dataloss for all the time I did this.

God of Thunder

Forgotten passwords, yeah I can feel your pain. Happened a long time ago on an old machine??? No check out this thread to get the story.

Other goofs of mine?? How long do you have??

Recently I was updating a machine at work to Windows 2000. We use Drive Image to load a standard image. After I finished upgrading it, I realised there was a reason why it hadn't been done before, there was software on it that wouldn't run on 2000.

Did I backup the machine before imaging it?? Would I be telling this story in this thread if I had?? Hell no!

So I have to re-image it with Win 98, but there was financial info on the PC's hard drive that needed to be restored.

Luckily for me someone in my department had most of the info that need to be restored, but about two months worth had to be re-input by hand.

That was a couple of months ago and I'm still hearing about it. Needless to say, I backup EVERYTHING before re-imaging now.

That's just the latest one. Oh well, live and learn.

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theguyondacouch

I threw a computer out a 2nd story window, at about 2 am. It landed on my moms car Still works, my younger brother uses it for school reports.

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The_Dude

once, i added a vid card and it didnt work.

i thought it was the drivers from on board that was fuckin with it and deleted any file that had to do any thin w/ video.

result = no more booting up

solution : reformat.

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MontanaXVI

wow mine is just ignorance more than anything, i plugged my KB into my mouse slot and couldnt type anything

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giblfiz

Well, my X has managed to type rm -rf in both her mp3 directory and in the /home directory (both within the space of a week) which I thought was pretty damd funny.

As for me I recently spend 5 days wracking my brain trying to figure out why XF86config files were always being generated with ATI devices when I used any of the autoconfiguring scripts. I even spend about a day going thru the code. Then my roommate reminded me that I had traded him my Nvidea card for an ATI. I probably should have opend up the case at some point, but man did I feel like an idot.

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viveleroi0

I spent about six hours working on various audio compilations, mixing, editing, etc. I had a lot of other information not backed up either, like my wife's The Sims game data. I decided to install Red Hat Linux 5.3 for my first-ever Linux experience and got lost in the install, MBR setup. Long story short, I think you know what happened.

Windows wouldn't boot and Linux wouldn't install. It said I had no OS.

I think that story ends as all big mistakes do.... reformat.

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yakimushi

Um, wired a cold cathode with my computer on? Ouch... loss of feeling in my fingers after that one.

Not paying attention, formatted the wrong hard drive, lost 8 gb of unreplacable, not backed up data.

Forgot to plug cpu fan back in, started system, noticed funny smell...

Too many to list. Toooo many.

sweeze

DOS:

c:\>del <directory>
-file not found, or directory not empty
c:\>cd <directory>
c:\DIR>dir /aw
-- . ..
c:\DIR>rm ..

on next reboot:
No System disk found.


whoops.... say bye bye to autoexec.bat/config.sys/etc.


whoops :-(

Xirax

Gentoo's etc-update screwed my /etc/ directory...Ah well. Gave gentoo its own hard drive and everything's quite better now.

One of the coolest things I've learned of linux is it's ability to mount, and chroot a directory. That has saved me more times than I can count.

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Kyp

Plugged power into the floppy drive just slightly off to the side to where only 3 of the prongs where on, turned on computer, funny smell, a needle had melted onto the power plug and the entire wire was fried.

The power supply was making strange noises before hand... *shrug*

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charliex

hard drives used to suffer from a thing called 'sticktion' they would basically stop spinning up properly, i had such a drive, with a lot of source code on it, a gentle tap every once in a while would get it going, but it got a harder tap and more often, and still no backup or just replacement, til one day, it wasn't going to budge.

so i hit it with a hard back copy of 'the art of electronics' which is rather a large book. It made a horrible noise and was never to live again, especially after i tossed it out of the second storey window..

fitting book to hit it with too.

LNCPapa

Forcibly changed windows directory name - as I watched all my file sizes in windows explorer change to 718 bytes right in front of my eyes... Machine died - booting with a boot disc and renaming the directory back didn't fix it completely.

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Flippy

Two things - I did both of these when I was very young and a 386 was top of the line

First one - I'd go into the BIOS, because it was one of those old setup programs that changed colours depending on which menu you were in. I tried to get as many colours to show up as possible, with the result of changing god knows how many settings on the computer. Needless to say, the computer wouldn't really boot up correctly after that, so my dad had to fix it.

Next - I made a new directory in c:\ to put some files in.

19/07/2003 01:05 PM <DIR> .
19/07/2003 01:05 PM <DIR> ..
0 File(s) 0 bytes

I didn't remember creating any new directories, so I did: del ..\*.* - it wiped out quite a few system files ... ouch lol

mrquackers

Lately? Tried to install an 9700 AIW with only a 300w power source. Machine kept dying after 5 minutes or so. Tried everything, including switching out RAM, buying a new OS, Voodoo chants, etc.

After 2 months, finally realized that by buying a 400w PS, everything would be dandy. Still slapping myself on the forehead.

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YaWhateva

Well, i ordered a shuttle mini pc and when it came in i somehow broke it so that the usb ports didnt work. I got mad and sent it back for another one and when that one came in, i did something again so that the display wouldnt come up at all. Angry, i sent it back one more time and am waiting right now for it to get back to me. I will not be touching the computer this time until it is fully put together and working. I spent $350 on the shuttle itself and $250 on the processor like a month ago and its still not working. bah.

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evercl

I was working on a case mod abouty a year ago and got it all done and ended up hooking up the power switch backwards. Not only frying my power supply but also nearlrly burning my aprtment down from the sparks.

BAMF

I willingly installed bonzi buddy once. I didnt know what it was, but saw the voice synthesizing part on my brothers computer and thought it looked cool. It took all of 5 mins to get annoying. It took all of 30 seconds to look up bonzi buddy on google and find out what I had unleashed. I spent about an hour, on and off, mostly off, dling and running adAware to fix my mistake. Burned once, never twice.

zztzed

Dumbest thing I ever did was delete the default route on a friend's machine that I was adminning while he was out of town. The machine was in New Jersey; I'm in South Carolina, so obviously I couldn't exactly just drive up and fix it. (Especially since I couldn't even drive at the time. I still can't, actually... )

I don't remember why I did it, or why I was even messing with the routing table at all. I just thought, "okay, need to delete the default route and readd it ... route del default, then route add default gw ..." ... I got up to about 'rou' and then the machine realized it didn't have a default route and stopped talking to me. And then about five seconds later I realized what I had done.

Needless to say, that's one mistake I'll never make again.

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MacGnG

trying to reinstall the os, well i dont need these fonts or extensions or control panels, just the system folder.......

oopz, it worked, sorta

Zeld2.0

Forgotten passwords always hurt still ;/

Worst of all however is just doing something so stupid like deleting the wrong file and having to reformat everything.

Sadly however the worst is my fault by being lazy - not rebooting properly and eventually screwing the computers over. and over. and over.

hrdwareguy

Forgetting to but the heat sink and fan on top of the processor before booting up. A 1Ghz processor smells real good when smoke curls out of it.

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0count

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.

sportsrule101

forgetting to attach fan correctly = bad news, especially for a poor college student

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redravin40

Early Mac experience from the 80's
While trying to clear enough space to work I noticed that the damn fonts took up a huge amount of space.
Thought, I only use one font so I'll just delete the rest.
Computer was now a boat anchor.

far2bored

Hmm.. I paid for AOL services once.

Last month I wanted to do a clean sweep of my system. I backed up the 12 gigs or so of files I'd amassed onto a a second hd and set out to format the boot drive. In a true stroke of genius I managed to format both drives, starting with my backup first. It took about five seconds to realize that I was formatting the wrong drive, and another five seconds to realize there was no cancel button. I sat and watched three years of unbacked up digital art, photographs, font collections, game characters etc being obliviated. I'm still kicking myself about that one.

billcollins

I did that, but I only burned my friend's carpet and fried the power cable (he doesn't let me come over or borrow his stuff anymore)

I spent a long time messing with my XF86config. Turnes out my computer was reading XF86config-4.

digby

back in the good ol' DOS 5.0 days, I mistakenly deleted command.com. I don't know how or why... but I didn't have much on the comp at the time.

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MPower

1. Was reinstalling the os (95 i think) on a computer while out of town a few years back and the cd was not bootable and i forgot to make a boot disk first. Snuck a floppy in a computer at some computer megastore the next day and made one. Guess it wasnt that bad.

2. Kinda off-topic but back in the '80s i was playing a game on my c64 for about 6hrs and at 4am or so i decided to save, so i stuck the save disk in and turned off the computer. Then i sat there for a min or so waiting for it to save before i realized the i had turned it off.

VeXteR

I fired up a T-bred 1700+ with the 7000 rpm fan unplugged. Jumped right in and played CS for about 15 minutes before I thought to myself "man, its aweful quiet in here, OH FUCK!!!!!" Good new is everything worked out fine. BTW, dont try this at home. This 1700 was very speacial and hit 2300 mhz on air at 48C.


Watched a buddy of mine that had been doing some fan bus wiring while stoned. He screwed something up and need to shut down really fast. So whats he do? He grabs the main ATX power plug and yanked it out of the 2 day old A7N8X ver 1. Good news is, he got a ver 2 in the RMA yeah....

I was picking up some stuff I just bought at the PC store to walk out the door. Dropped my brand spanking new, $147, IBM DeathStar 75GXP, Dead, never detected. Guy behind the couter was like " haha, cya".

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bryanzera

not a hardware oops, but a coding oops.

We have a database of about 250,000 users of our service, each with a password. One day, I wanted to change the password of my account, so I opened a psql monitor on our live database (not the development db) and typed:

update users set password = 'newpassword';

Anyone notice that that SQL statement is missing a 'where' clause?

I had just set 250,000 passwords to 'newpassword'. Backups were shady back then, so we had to do some hardcore data recovery.

Cactus

I installed a new fan, had to splice some wires off the power supply, and didnt tape them up very well. Fired it up and the tape comes lose and the wires touch and my power supply blows up.....you guys smell smoke? ...yeah I think so.....hmm is that coming out of the computer........

Cactus

Oh yeah and another bad one. I was working as a Unix server admin at a Telemarketting place. Ok so they need a file moved out of the archive back to the working directory. so do my little mv"file"space "directory" ...enter


Ok all done....hmm dir..no file found...hmm cd.. dir... no file found ...wtf..


phone rings and its the manager of the call center


Oooo umm ahh oo I uh I, I dont know what happened, i was um ah I uh my computer just crashed, all the computers in the building just crashed.. I , I ahh

then it hits me

I just moved the entire working directory into a new one named the file name, and 300 people are on the clock getting paid to look at blue screens on dumb terminals....

Jolt

I once format /q /u C: instead of D:
I recall saying I was glad it was my OWN C: drive.

on another occasion I set a client's hard disk down on top of the running computer...PCB side down. let the smoke out of a small capacitor. Lost his QuickBooks data until I could get my hands on another of the same model disk, to trade PCB's between them and rescue the files...

When handling hard disks, ALWAYS place them PCB side UP!

Latch

PCB?

Gotenks

Spent 150 bucks on an amd 800 and crushed the chip with a generic heatsink! Everytime I put together a system, I spend 15 minutes positioning the shim and practicing with a piece of cardboard as the chip.

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yotta

Uh, I formated the wrong partition once. That really sucked...
I've had a couple accidents with 'rm'
and, on one of our servers that has coumpter/phone controled outlets.. I shut off the outlet the phone controler was hooked up to, and the DSL modem. One of the other admins had to drive arcoss town to fix it.

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