Initially, how many times did you bork your system, beyond your repair?

[mikodo]

I started with computers almost 5 years ago, and Ubuntu and greater Linux 4 years ago. Feeling a need to try other things, I borked my Ubuntu install beyond my repair, probably at least 10 times over the first two years. I would often stay up for 20 hours on a weekend putting things back to shape again. My wife who can't turn on a computer, has made comparisons to me, with our children/grandchildren who use windows exclusively. She thinks I am inept. LOL. Maybe I am, but I have learned. Now, I don't bork my important stuff anymore, which is always well backed up, because I will inevitably need it.

That's my story. How about you guys?

[Frogs Hair]

I have re-installed without needing to due to panic and not spending enough time trying to solve problems I created mainly by fooling around with ppas . Example , removal of one dependency wipes out the entire desktop .

[mikodo]

One of things that I borked initially, were grub instances when installing and un-installing different distros, which made me be careful to have grub updated on my primary install. Boot Repair fixed things for me once, too.

[Bashing-om]

OK, I also admit that several times while getting comfortable with this operating system I have borked it up beyond my then ability to repair !

Since I do that ... (still !) I have learned to have good backups, and a liveDVD, and an operational standby operating system (12.04). From (re-)install I can be back up and operational in 30 minutes or less ... ain't scripts wonderful !

ubuntu, don't get no better than that

[ajgreeny]

The first time I attempted to use (unsuccessfully) the xorg-edgers ppa and totally borked my GUI was long before I had any competence with the command line, and the only way that I was capable of repairing the system was a complete re-install. Luckily, of course, that is very quick with Ubuntu, so I was up and running again in about 20 mins, plus extra time for updates and added packages.

If it happened now I would just deal with it all very quickly and easily without having to start again from scratch, which is one of the delights of Linux; try doing that in Windows, which I have not really used since 2005 when I first tried, and loved, ubuntu.

[Sly14Cat]

Well I've had my system for a year and I've finally borked it a few days ago. Apparently trying to triple boot with Mageia isn't exactly a good idea. Especially when it clumps your other partitions together.. And then you try to remove mageia... And it clumps your entire harddrive together... And you have to reformat it

Yep that was the best saturday evening ever

[Bashing-om]

but Sly14Cat ! Look what you learned ...ya gotta love it .

you break it you fix it

[CharlesA]

Broken RAID array after trying to figure out which slot in a (brand new) drive cage was acting up.

Well, not totally broken, but I had one drive rebuilding and one saying it was bad...

Google-fu ftw!

As far as reinstalls go.. not often. I think I've only done reinstalls when i've had major problems and/or move distros/versions.

[nothingspecial]

This has been mentioned elsewhere but I reinstalled a few times trying to fix a sound problem when the issue was that I had the speakers plugged into the wrong hole :/

[eriktheblu]

I've never messed up Ubuntu to the point it was unusable (just to where reinstall was easier). Windows on the other hand has borked itself to that extent plenty of times.