Your worst moments?

CyberGhost

What's your worst moment you've had with computers?

Mine has to be when I accidently wiped my hard drive, I had linux on ext3 partition and wanted to get rid of it, so I managed to delete windows partition and all the other partitions too. I had no back up, I nearly had a heart attack, I was completely davestated for couple of days and basically I couldn't go outside, all my work and files, years spent.. EVERYTHING wiped out. Well eventually I recorved now I back up on 2 drives and also on DVDs lol.

So.. come on, tell us your wacky adventures

Fanny Cradock

I neglected to attach my mobo to my case by the brass screws - instead attaching it directly to the case - duhhhh! Of course it went on fire, with plenty of foul smelling smoke to boot. Fortunately, only the mobo was damaged. And, whats more, there was a happy ending! My stupidity went unpunished as I managed to get a replacement off asus. Bless them!

Lesson learnt.

awhir

Fanny Cradock wrote:

I neglected to attach my mobo to my case by the brass screws - instead attaching it directly to the case - duhhhh! Of course it went on fire, with plenty of foul smelling smoke to boot. Fortunately, only the mobo was damaged. And, whats more, there was a happy ending! My stupidity went unpunished as I managed to get a replacement off asus. Bless them!

Lesson learnt.

lucky oh and allways read the instaurations

TerrorFirmer

I had my computer at the top of the stairs, ready to be moved....and accidently bump of the foot send it onto the first step, from which it launched itself over the following few steps, to crash down on the next few, etc...

It broke into bits, inside and out.

PS - I have also wiped my HD TWICE before, without anything backed up...I now backup all my stuff to DVD regularly, but it was a despressing few weeks

Omnipresence

CyberGhost wrote:

What's your worst moment you've had with computers?

Mine has to be when I accidently wiped my hard drive, I had linux on ext3 partition and wanted to get rid of it, so I managed to delete windows partition and all the other partitions too. I had no back up, I nearly had a heart attack, I was completely davestated for couple of days and basically I couldn't go outside, all my work and files, years spent.. EVERYTHING wiped out. Well eventually I recorved now I back up on 2 drives and also on DVDs lol.

So.. come on, tell us your wacky adventures

Ha ha SNAP .. pretty much word for word same happened to me, only I wasn't so devastated... nice to do a purge every now an then ... I had emails from like 1994 ... I mean ... was I ever going to need them...

I defo take more care now what with having lots of holiday photos etc... things like this are more hard to loose when compared to documents...

-A

Mutant_Fruit

*Thinks to himself* What does that 220/110 switch on the PSU do? *flicks switch* Thats what it does! It makes smoke come out of the PSU!

Also, i did the thing with the mobo and risers before aswell. Thats about it.

Creamy Goodness

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

*Thinks to himself* What does that 220/110 switch on the PSU do? *flicks switch* Thats what it does! It makes smoke come out of the PSU!

mutant does that only fry the psu or does it take out the rest of the components aswell?

me and a mate were having a bet on this and well lets just say we don't have the money to find out

Fanny Cradock

awhir wrote:

lucky oh and allways read the instaurations

in my defence:

1) the case cost €40 inc. psu and came with no instructions. It makes a sound like a vaccum cleaner with something stuck up the nozzle and rattles like a washingmachine on its spin cycle. I had a funny feeling, as i cast the screws into the bin, that they could be of some importance, but in my eagerness I assured myself that some Chinese fella had just lashed them in there for the ****s and giggles. Funnily enough the problem didn't arise for about a month after I'd put the thing together!

2) I'm an idiot

Sam Vimes

i was making a program to erase a hard drive just for the craic and accidentally used it on myself. got the stuff back though

i was fixing my cousins pc and she came to collect it while i was out. my mother thought she could carry it down the stairs but realised she was wrong after one step. it tumbled and bounced on every step on the way down. but dell make some strong god damn cases. not a bother on it afterwards

TerrorFirmer

Fanny Cradock wrote:

in my defence:

1) Funnily enough the problem didn't arise for about a month after I'd put the thing together!

Wow....! A month is a long time you got out of it like that though! Maplins were selling a case, with speakers, keyboard and 450w psu included for 57 euro recently.....probably makes q-tec look good, but i dunno anyone that bought one, even though im dying to know

RoyalMarine

Cremo wrote:

mutant does that only fry the psu or does it take out the rest of the components aswell?

me and a mate were having a bet on this and well lets just say we don't have the money to find out

it only fries the PSU.
thank god.

same thing happened to me.
but the worst id say would probably have been when i was packing my car for the weekend and i left my boot unlocked... dont know why...

lets just say i was in the cop station a few hours later after realising my computer/monitor/keyboard were nicked!

funny enough they left my mouse!
was only a new built machine and it cost me about 1300.
wasnt too impressed but it was a big lesson learned.

KdjaCL

Mine involves pain, blood stitches and and one smashed DVD Drive.

1st off the metal plate in the 5 and qtr bay was being tricky and not coming out so i stuck my hand in and ripped it out, started to remove dvd drive from static bag when i noticed the blood, i had ripped my hand on the tiny piece of metal that was left.

Plugged it in and turned on pc didnt show...the pain and blood had made me forget the slave jumper, unscrewed it and was unattaching it when the Molex seemed to have mated with the drive and refused to come out (it was a tidy case so the power cables ran behind the motherboard) bearing in my mind i only had one hand sort i grasped it and ripped it out taking the corner of the motherboard with it

Went into the garage with DVD drive and picked up sledgehammer. It was evil it deserved it.


kdjac

uberpixie

All my bad moments came together for my first build.

(1) Got a qutec case + PSU:o

Very quickly coped onto the fact the case was pants and had NO airflow what so ever and explained the odd crash I was getting
(and all that heat........)

Very quickly replaced with a big dirty chieftech cas + psu.

(2) My gf 4200 64MB dies after 6 months: took a week and a half of poking and prodding, a full stripdown and rebuild and a reinstall of windows + drivers to confirm it was the card.
(in hind site overclocked the nuts off it, fecking wuss of a gainward card couldn't take it, bah!)

Was replaced by a new creative GF2 pro 64mb for €40 out of the bargin bucket in PC World.
(Card was perfect, boxed with manual, was only missing the s video cable!)


(3) Static shocked my hardrive: did it proper, saw a flash and heard a pop!

Put it back in to the PC and prayed: worked!:eek:

Still worked and gave another 2 years and is still going strong in a mates PC :-)

(4) Low level formatted my harddrive: mbr went tits up
(yes there are better ways of fixing it but it seemed likae a good idea at the time:D)

JackKelly

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

*Thinks to himself* What does that 220/110 switch on the PSU do? *flicks switch* Thats what it does! It makes smoke come out of the PSU!

Also, i did the thing with the mobo and risers before aswell. Thats about it.

rofl, been there. Blew up in my face.

petes

TimAy wrote:

rofl, been there. Blew up in my face.

My very first PC which my parents had bought me for college. Did the exact same. I would say a fair few people have done this.

Cake Fiend

1. A few years back a mate of mine had bought an old AT machine off someone for a few notes and didn't know much about setting it up. So, I was at his house at a party when I decided to have a quick look at it. I had had a bit to drink, and some other party treats, so I forgot to actually hook the PSU up to the power button (for those who don't know, in AT cases the live mains wire from the PSU connects directly to the power switch). I plugged the PSU in and blew the crap out of it - it shorted itself out because the wires were touching the metal case (as was I :eek:). It tripped the breakers downstairs and all the music and lights turned off, leaving me to go down and sheepishly explain myself.

2. In work a couple of years ago, we had got a shipment of brand new 80GB drives (about as big as you could get at the time). I dropped one. It didn't survive

DublinWriter

Right, 12 years ago, me working as consultant for major IBM dealer, supervising the installation of a tape backup unit and additional hard-drive installation on the main server of a major Irish food producing company (who will remain nameless!).

Considering the two tasks above to be carried out, which would you have done first considering that the server *never* had a backup?

Yes, that's right, let a hardware tech crack it open and install a the new drive! However the existing drive had to be taken out to get access to the SCSI cable.

Hardware tech removes the drive, places it on the floor, installs the new drive back again with the original drive.

Result? One fried original drive. We never found out what happened, but I suspect that a static electrical charge passed right through the original drive, wiping everything, payroll, manufacturing data, everything.

The I.T. mananger at the time said to me that as a situation it was worse than when she got pregnant at 17.

We couriered out the original drive to a couple of specialist data recovery labs in the UK, but the data on the platters was fried.

The 200+ factory workers at the site were informed of the problems the next day, and threatened industrial action if their payroll wasn't processed on time.

The company also had a team of 1K a day management consultants who'd saved *all* their previous two months work on the server.

Thankfully, all finanlly worked out ok.

I can laugh about it today, but only just...

RoyalMarine

Sico wrote:

1. A few years back a mate of mine had bought an old AT machine off someone for a few notes and didn't know much about setting it up. So, I was at his house at a party when I decided to have a quick look at it. I had had a bit to drink, and some other party treats, so I forgot to actually hook the PSU up to the power button (for those who don't know, in AT cases the live mains wire from the PSU connects directly to the power switch). I plugged the PSU in and blew the crap out of it - it shorted itself out because the wires were touching the metal case (as was I :eek:). It tripped the breakers downstairs and all the music and lights turned off, leaving me to go down and sheepishly explain myself.

2. In work a couple of years ago, we had got a shipment of brand new 80GB drives (about as big as you could get at the time). I dropped one. It didn't survive

yeah i usually drop them when im tryin to stuff work property into my underwear while the boss is busy running around the place....

RoyalMarine

DublinWriter wrote:

Right, 12 years ago, me working as consultant for major IBM dealer, supervising the installation of a tape backup unit and additional hard-drive installation on the main server of a major Irish food producing company (who will remain nameless!).

Considering the two tasks above to be carried out, which would you have done first considering that the server *never* had a backup?

Yes, that's right, let a hardware tech crack it open and install a the new drive! However the existing drive had to be taken out to get access to the SCSI cable.

Hardware tech removes the drive, places it on the floor, installs the new drive back again with the original drive.

Result? One fried original drive. We never found out what happened, but I suspect that a static electrical charge passed right through the original drive, wiping everything, payroll, manufacturing data, everything.

The I.T. mananger at the time said to me that as a situation it was worse than when she got pregnant at 17.

We couriered out the original drive to a couple of specialist data recovery labs in the UK, but the data on the platters was fried.

The 200+ factory workers at the site were informed of the problems the next day, and threatened industrial action if their payroll wasn't processed on time.

The company also had a team of 1K a day management consultants who'd saved *all* their previous two months work on the server.

Thankfully, all finanlly worked out ok.

I can laugh about it today, but only just...

jesus!!! thats the type of things you see in the news....
your to blame i bet..

how did ye get it resolved?

DublinWriter

RoyalMarineComm wrote:

jesus!!! thats the type of things you see in the news....
your to blame i bet..

how did ye get it resolved?

The whole thing was resolved via informal negotiation of senior managment of both companies, with 50/50 blame being agreed.

The Food company agreed that they should have been doing backups previously. Their IT manager was 'nudged' out under 'amicable' terms a year later. Their IT Director went soon afterward.

The company I worked for agreed that the external tape back up unit should have been installed first. My career didn't suffer.

The whole incident never hit the courts or the press.

Phew!

netwhizkid

My two worst moments would be, first off getting a virus and losing all the stuff on my HD. (about two months worth as it was new) my second worst moment would be having a power failure when my sister was after spending about 9hrs typing a college essay and report. Do you think she hit save along the line? after three pages yes not 50 :eek: Anyway I got the blame and typed up the missing 10 pages or so for her. (Thank god for MS Word Recovery) It recovered a lot of it but not those ten pages. I haven't had may bad experiences tbh. Then again isn't XP a bad experience every day??

Mutant_Fruit

Cremo wrote:

mutant does that only fry the psu or does it take out the rest of the components aswell?

me and a mate were having a bet on this and well lets just say we don't have the money to find out

As they said already, it only fries the PSU. Thankfully All i can say is, don't flick the switch!

bpmurray

My worst was when I typed

rm * .bak

in the directory where the customer's live database was located, and only realized what I did when I got the message "could not remove .bak: no such file or directory". I nearly had a heart attack when the entire system went down.

You can imagine my delight when I realized that the DB was on a raw volume so all I had to do was relink it into that dir & they only lost a couple of transactions.

Fanny Cradock

ahh, i understand you're typing in english, but that's as far as it goes. i guess that will have to do!

Ruu_Old

I was merging a split partition on my hard drives when the power went out, of course no backup, everything gone from one of the paritions when power came back. I learned my lesson and of course when my Wang 386 died *sniff*

bpmurray

Fanny Cradock wrote:

ahh, i understand you're typing in english, but that's as far as it goes. i guess that will have to do!

A rather bizarre response considering this is a computer forum. OK, here's a translation for the Windoze-fixated
rm = right-click & select Delete
*.bak = all those files that have the extension ".bak"
* .bak = all files, plus the file that is called ".bak" (note the space)

In other words, it deleted all files, and then tried to delete the file called ".bak". The fact that the live data were in a raw database means that they were in a disk volume that was written to explicitly by the database, rather than the operating system, and it was linked to by means of a node in the current directory (Unix has links from which one can point to something else). This means that I deleted the database of a live running system, but it was recoverable.

hopeful

My wife decided to move the tumble dryer to a nice spot under the stairs....right next to my file server with 500gb+ of data.

The SMART data makes some intersting reading. All three drives got to 68c before one gave up. That 120bg Seagate is now junk. Interestingly the WD and Maxtor drives are still going strong with only the Maxtor showing a few bad sectors.

Also did this stripping down an old Dell server case...



Other highlights...
Burning up an Xp 2000+ cpu by that one overclock too far.
My cat using my brand new windowed side panel on my Stacker as a scratching post.
My wifes face when she see's the credit card bill most months:D

garrath

I did something similar to some other posts. When I was young(er) I was compiling a lot of stuff as root (I know, bad idea to be plodding about as root, but I was young) and ended up with a lot of files everywhere. As I didn't usually use root, I thought the best thing would be to backup some of the important files in /root and then just delete everything in roots home dir. Great, I backed up the files and wanted to do a:

rm -rf ~/*

of course, what I actually did was:

rm -rf ~ /*

which helpfully deleted roots directory and then proceeded to delete everything else on the hard disk. There was me sitting there thinking "Hmm, this is taking a long time!"

Friend of mine once dropped a 3000 euro rack mounted server. I've also blown at least 5 psu's (sometimes they make a satisfying pop), fried one cpu, destroyed 4-5 hard disks (one dropped, one hit off a live mb and made a cool spark). Hmmm, lots of stuff really. Oh, just the other day I set my tea down and was examining my 512mb rs-mmc card, and dropped it into my very full cup. Worked fine after that. Once, the fan on my gfx card was too loud, so I took it off. Suddenly strange artifacts started to appear on the screen, so I stuck my hand in the case and got a very nasty burn. I stuck a (slightly) damaged cd into a drive, it shattered very spectacularly and took the drive with it.

God, I'm lethal. When I was a lot younger, I went to work with my dad. I was playing around on his new computer, and thought, well, lets open command.com with the text editor (this was dos). The text editor helpfully saves the file on exit. That day I learned the difference between a binary file and a text file. Text files don't run. Managed to fix it though.

I've done the thing with the partitions also ("hmm, I THINK it was /dev/hda1").

So, if anyone wants me to help fix their computer, I'd be glad to help. I'll bring some bandaids

EOA_Mushy

My brother changed the power settings on my psu (230 -> 110) which promptly set the mobo on fire right beside the ram... This being the days where a pII 450 was the height of technology. and i had a gig of ram. Luckily I had a spare mobo & psu... Ram (Thank god) damaged.

Brother through a full can of beer at my head... I ducked, there goes my 1st
LCD.

Mate fires bb gun at another can, on another occasion.... ricochet... 2nd LCD.. BYE...

Brother, after me telling him that his scsi controller is F*cked, decides he wants my music when i am not around. Pulls 2 disks out of my machine and puts them into his... Bye,bye to 2 16gig scsi 2 uf/w

I'll leave it at that.... Its not much for 18years of computer use.

Blowfish

In 4th year, in the computer lab in school, my friend did the 220/110 switch, while I was actually using the PC. Made a nice bang, and puff of smoke. Suprisingly nobody else noticed.

I've done the partition thing, on a dual boot Linux/XP. Didn't lose anything though, as it was a dodgy hard drive, so I had just backed up.

I destroyed a CD drive in the stupidest way possible...by putting 2 CD's in at once. In my defence, the PC was above eye level, so I couldn't see the first one in there. Made a great crunching sound, before giving up, leaving me having to pry it open. Both CD's were scratched, but miraculously still worked.

came close to rm -rf * on / as well, but thankfully stopped to think about it for a second, before realising I was in the wrong directory.

One of the stupidest i've seen other people do, is a small company I was working part time for. They got in broadband, and didn't get a firewall. The machine had 256 ram, and by the time I got to it, it was so clogged up with spyware etc, it was using over 600MB while doing nothing. The first run of adaware picked up over 1000 threats. Needless to say I reformatted.

EOA_Mushy

Cremo wrote:

mutant does that only fry the psu or does it take out the rest of the components aswell?

me and a mate were having a bet on this and well lets just say we don't have the money to find out

Kills the mobo any how....

Ruu_Old

EOA_Mushy wrote:

My brother changed the power settings on my psu (230 -> 110)

Done that too a good few years ago, got lots of fireworks and smells but no damage apart from the fuxored psu

Mutant_Fruit

EOA_Mushy wrote:

Kills the mobo any how....

Maybe if you have a QTec :P A decent PSU shouldn't take out anything else except itself.

bpmurray

More nasty surprises that came back to me when I thought about this for a while ....

• In the old days of removable hard drives, I had a problem with a disk and suspected that the heads had crashed. When I shut the machine (a mini) down, I took the disks out into their containers as usual, and left a note for the guy who usually got in first, warning him about the problem. When he arrived the next day, he went straight to the machine without seeing the note, and put the two disks on, but swapped them around, with the result that there were now two wrecked disk drives and two heaps of brown dust. And this was in the good old days when these 65MB disks cost about 5 grand each, and a set of heads about 10.
• While working on the prototype of a new machine, I smelled smoke, and powered down the machine. When the engineers came, I couldn't tell exactly where the smell had come from, so I powered it up again, smoke poured out of the magnetic tape controller, it burst into flames and triggered the fire systems, flooding the place with inert gas. We legged it before being suffocated.

DublinWriter

A couple of years back I was taking a card out of a PC.

The case was very poorly built and had lots of sharp edges.

The screwdriver slipped and I caught the skin of the knuckle on my right index finger on the sharp edge of the case.

Result? Half the skin on my knuckle was 'lifted' giving me a wonderful view of my white shiney knucklebone. Lovely.

It eventually healed without stictches but the tendon was sore on and off for about a year after.

zerodown

Mine was in relation to Partition Magic (Worst Possible program) DO IT YOURSELF!

I used part magic to create a ext3 for linux. I had 3 partitions on the disk

1. WIndows
2. Files (Movies, games etc)
3. Linux Ext3 with extended swap of 2gig

So all went well ckicked ok, computer restarted and went on to create the extension for linux, next it reboots and starts again. At this point im starting to worry.

Next "Moving Partition d: which is 2 (files) by 2 mb? WTF why was it moving the important partition by 2 mb and not the small linux one i selected.

ANyway i let it run so it would not corrupt anything but after it hit 28% boom shutdown. Disk wouldn boot back up,.

Eventually i got my windows partition working but the rest was badly corrupt. I was able to recover about 60% of my files but overall i lost over 140gigs of data. I nearly cried so i deciced not to give up. I opened dos and used fdisk to remove all but windows partition. Copied my files onto another hd and deleted all the rest on corrupt one.

Didn't give up and later that day i finally got it the way i wanted:
1. Windows
2. FIles
3. Linux EXT3
4. Swap Drive


All i can say is if i ever meet the maker of that program il be having a few "Unpleasant" words with him lol!

Ruu_Old

Ah yes Partition Tragic as I have heard it named

zerodown

Ruu wrote:

Ah yes Partition Tragic as I have heard it named

Definatly!!! Luckily i had r-studio and got some back.

stevejazzx

attached a fan wire to the wrong place on the mobo, it got hot, really hot:eek:

Cuddlesworth

Took the Ihs off a 600 euro cpu, mounted it with the backing plate on wrong and broke off one side of the core. I nearly cried.

Sparky

I had a laptop hard drive with about 6 years of invoices just stored onto it.
I connected it to the desktop PC as the laptop screen broke.
Im such a hurry I connected the ribbon in reverse. I spent 20 mins wondering why the HDD wasn't showing up, only to realise afterwards that the HDD got fried.

I took a drastic measure to get the data back, I opened the HDD gently dismantled, removed the platters and made them into a new HDD, when it all worked I was glad.
So my misshap costed 2 HDD's and 1 long day of trying not to sweat and keeping the platters from not being damaged.

awhir

Sparky-s wrote:

I had a laptop hard drive with about 6 years of invoices just stored onto it.
I connected it to the desktop PC as the laptop screen broke.
Im such a hurry I connected the ribbon in reverse. I spent 20 mins wondering why the HDD wasn't showing up, only to realise afterwards that the HDD got fried.

I took a drastic measure to get the data back, I opened the HDD gently dismantled, removed the platters and made them into a new HDD, when it all worked I was glad.
So my misshap costed 2 HDD's and 1 long day of trying not to sweat and keeping the platters from not being damaged.

can just imagine it

WizZard

Sparky-s wrote:

I took a drastic measure to get the data back, I opened the HDD gently dismantled, removed the platters and made them into a new HDD, when it all worked I was glad.
So my misshap costed 2 HDD's and 1 long day of trying not to sweat and keeping the platters from not being damaged.

Wow! :eek: That is not an easy thing to do, and usually only possible in clean room facilities! Lucky you!

SeanW

Well, I never had moments quite as bad as some of these but my the assembly of my new computer was a bit of a learning experience:

Never installed a CPU/heatsink combo before, and didn't RTFM, so I just stuck the stock heatsink/fan/thermal pad onto the processor and secured one of the two latches. It looked secure mainly because the stock thermal pad stuck between the CPU and heatsink.

Next day I heard a big thud :eek: opened up the case and found the heatsink on the floor of the chassis.

Fortunately I hadn't started using it yet and didn't have any of the peripheral cards installed, so the processor didn't overheat and the heatsink/fan didn't smash anything on the way down.

conzy

I was being an idiot, blowing on a fan with no shroud to make it spin..........

It was all fun and games until it took a chunk out of my lip:mad:

In another fan related accident, I touched a 120mm fan while it was running at 100%, I broke a blade off and it hurt really bad:mad:

TonyM.

i was flashing my bios tonight and the screen froze.
Ifinally figured out the batteries were gone in my keyboard.

Cuddlesworth

conzymaher wrote:

In another fan related accident, I touched a 120mm fan while it was running at 100%, I broke a blade off and it hurt really bad:mad:

I have a few large scar's from doing that. And no feeling in one of my fingers. Just a painfull moment, rather than a bad one.

TonyM.

i once open a winrar file with a full backup of xp pro in it and sent the contents to the desktop it completly covered the screen in files.

wheresmybeaver

I managed to severely fcuk up my old Toshiba laptop when I was moving stuff to my new laptop; completely corrupted windows xp. Couldn't get into a safe mode or anything... The toshiba recovery disc would only let me completely reformat the disc, not recover the installation. Thousands of family & personal photos, documents, home videos etc on there.... not a single backup.... and I'm no computer expert..

So I spent a very nervous evening installing a linux distro, then grabbing all my documents that way, one CD at a time....

Of course these experiences teach valuable lessons. I think I now have at least 3 backups of everything I ever do on external drives and DVDs... :rolleyes:

EDIT: Oh yeah, another classic one: managed to lose a final year college project by yanking on the power cable of the computer I was working on. File completely disappeared; absolutely gutted.

Gryzor

i managed to lose 80Gb of lab data while trying to extend a raid array....whole thing went tits up....backups hadn't worked in about 6 months :eek: ....theres no good way to explain that to your boss, there just isn't....luckily it happened during a weeks shutdown, so there was no one aound....after scouring the net i came across "Get data back for NTFS" which i had to buy out of my own pocket, cause i couldn't explain to anyone why i needed it..;) ....76 hours that program had to work for, but fair play it got it all back...every last file ...and no one here was ever any the wiser..:cool:...but they were the longest 76 hours of my life.....

Sparky

WizZard wrote:

Wow! :eek: That is not an easy thing to do, and usually only possible in clean room facilities! Lucky you!

Thats the thing, I knew that the platters need to be very very very clean. So it was a make or break situation, knowing my persistant nature it was better to try than not at all.