Doofus Computing Moments

[Rumor]

We've all had them . . . those moments when we've done some really silly things only to have a forehead-slapping moment of clarity during which we hoped that no one had witnessed our efforts of moments before. Share yours!

Sadly, my folder of doofus moments is pretty large.

I'll share this one:
I had received a new case and wanted to transfer my existing components into the new case. The new case had 6 fans, not counting the HSF and power supply. It was a full-size tower case and weighed a lot.

I spent a long time taking the components out of the old case. I put the motherboard into the new case and slowly put things back together, heat sink/fan, hard drives, CD-Rom, DVDr, etc.

I closed up the case, hooked up the mouse, keyboard, monitor, speakers and the other peripherals. Then, with great anticipation, I pressed the power button. Nothing. Zip, nada, not-gonna-work. Maybe I missed something? I opened the case and saw the power indicator light on the mother board. It was shining a nice healthy green. Maybe it was the power switch? Maybe that was what was bad?

I must have fussed with it for 30 minutes trying this and that before I saw the memory sticks lying next to a screwdriver. Yeah, the memory sticks I had forgotten to install.

D'oh! #-o

[NeghVar]

This happened to me fairly recently, not one of my better moments.

When building a computer for my father I set put everything in closed it all up, turned it on and the fans started spinning everything seemed good, unfortunatly the monitor was just black with its stupid little blinking LED, not even a no signal message. I took the whole thing apart, checked all the connections, specs, manuals nothing, even called up tech support, nothing was working.

Eventually I took all of the parts and swapped them with another system I had and they all worked fine. Eventually after about a week of doing this I took the thing into the store, turns out I had forgot to change the cpu jumper setting, once that was done it fired up without a problem.

[Brunellus]

did the same building my mom's computer. everything went fine. boot up--hey, where's the hard disk?

I had forgotten to plug the IDE cable in...

[Stormy Eyes]

I was drunk once and managed to do sudo rm -rf /. Luckily, I had a recent backup of /home.

[Brunellus]

I was drunk once and managed to do sudo rm -rf /. Luckily, I had a recent backup of /home.
that's a pretty good argument for strong passwords--they're harder to type when you're drunk.

[Stormy Eyes]

that's a pretty good argument for strong passwords--they're harder to type when you're drunk.

Yeah, as long as you don't set up /etc/sudoers to let yourself use sudo without having to enter your password.

[prizrak]

I think I might win this one.
This was a ways back in Win95 days. I was trying to play something with sound on the pootah and for some reason was getting no sound whatsoever. Now my speakers were part of the monitor so I knew they were on. I went through 2 hours of diagnostics and damn near reinstalling Windows. Then by accident I hit the volume knob and sound magically appeared, turns out that thing was in what would pretty much be the off position (it was an analog wheel).
That one was the worst I can remember.

[ice60]

i did this knowing it would break my computer ](*,) lol
http://wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=104112

[nalmeth]

This is a story I heard, about a tech support guy who got fired over the incident.
Basically, an older lady was having difficulty getting her computer going. Since I don't have a link to an article about it, I can't say for sure, but I think it was a Microsoft tech support line, and naturally she thought Windows was her computer. You can believe this story or not.
The convo went something like this:
techguy "When the computer boots up, what do you see?"
oldlady "Hold on, I have to go back and try it again. It wasn't working before"
waiting waiting waiting
oldlady "OK, I'm at the computer now, but when I push the on button, nothing happens. The computer just sits there."
techguy "OK, can you see if the power cord is plugged into the back of the computer?"
oldlady "I don't know, there are all kinds of wires and things coming out of it."
more back and forth like this
techguy "Ok, Ok, we've figured out which one is the power cord right? (getting impatient and a little sarcastic) Now check to make sure that the power cord is plugged into both the wall and the computer."
oldlady "Oh, OK, just hold on for a minute, I have to get a flashlight?"
techguy "A flashlight? Why do you need a flash light?"
oldlady "Oh because the power has been out for a while so I can't see hardly anything in the dark!"
techguy ".................."
Use your imagination to decide what the tech support guy said to get fired..

[majikstreet]

roflmao^^ does it sound something like you're a f---ing idiot?


i did this knowing it would break my computer ](*,) lol
http://wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=104112
lol

[Kvark]

The first day in highschool we recieved books, locker keys and other stuff we where going to need during our time in highschool. Since almost the entire education was going to revolve around using computers we also recieved laptops together with the necessary cables and CDs and there where plenty of power and network outlets all over the school.

Me and my best friend decided to stuff our new and exciting laptops into our backpacks at the end of the day, nobody would notice if we took them home to install some extra games and programs on them. We went to my place, installed some good multiplayer games and tried to connect the laptops with the included network cables. We spent the whole afternoon playing with every network setting we could think of but the computers refused to talk to eachother. At least we felt very elite about knowing so many things to try, even fancy hacker dos commands like ping and ipconfig.

The next day they handed out network cables to us. For the rest of that class I kept silently wondering "If this is the network cable, then what did they give us yesterday???". For half the day me and my friend was debating the mystery until we finally realized we had been trying to connect the built in modems using the included phone cables.

So after day two we made a new attempt and tried everything again for several hours. With exactly the same lack of result.

We asked some friends about it the next day and they thought the fresh newcommers to geekschool who tried everything thinking normal non-crossed network cables could be used to connect 2 computers directly was a very amusing joke. I'm glad they didn't know what we tried the day before that.

[mrgnash]

When I was about twelve, I followed the advice of someone on an IRC chat channel and typed:


deltree /y c:\ ](*,)

[haktar]

I'm new to linux, I've had xubuntu installed for all of a day and a half and It's going ok. Now to configure the ide zip drive.. no problem I think.. there's a handy how-to in the forums.. I follow the detailed instructions, create a mount point, edit the fstab for the drive as a secondery master.

Nothing works.. I go through the process repeatedly checking entries mount-ing, cfdisk-ing, reading forums searching for that illusive last clue that will make it all better. Nothing.

Fed up and tired I resign myself to the fact that the zip drive isn't going to work. I shutdown the machine resolving to sell the damn thing. Power off, case open, out with the drive... hang on... shouldn't there be ..jumpers.. on the back of this??

5 min and 2 jumpers later and the sun shines on the linux desktop once more.

[rowanparker]

Haha, unlucky.

I once spent a good hour backing up all my settings and some files (not all files, they were on different partition) before a reinstall. I checked it all but forgot to backup the folder and it got deleted with the reinstall. ](*,)

It was just some emails and settings, just spent some extra time setting everything up again.

Rowan.

[djsroknrol]

One time awhile back, I was in a hurry to finish a rig for a friend, and when I went to plug the monitor in the card fell inside...I looked like George W. trying to go thru that Twainese door that was locked...funny what lockdown screws will do when they're not installed....;)

[YourSurrogateGod]

I got a programming one.

#define MAX 100
...
struct * stuff = malloc(sizeof(MAX));
=============================
for(int O = 0; O < 10; 0++) // <--- the last part is a zero, not an 'O', afterwards, I've never used neither 'O' nor 'o' in a for-loop, ever.

[YourSurrogateGod]

I think I might win this one.
This was a ways back in Win95 days. I was trying to play something with sound on the pootah and for some reason was getting no sound whatsoever. Now my speakers were part of the monitor so I knew they were on. I went through 2 hours of diagnostics and damn near reinstalling Windows. Then by accident I hit the volume knob and sound magically appeared, turns out that thing was in what would pretty much be the off position (it was an analog wheel).
That one was the worst I can remember.
I think I've had atleast one of those. And I'm fairly certain that I pulled the same crap on a personal CD player... but for a PC, I've yet to re-install the OS.

[Randomskk]

I mounted my /home, /etc/, /usr etc directories to a chroot, then got bored and deleted the chroot.
Boy, was that ever a bad idea.

So I decided to make the best of my situation and did a rm -rf /, which was at least educational (read: swearing and pulling out USB drive and unplugging network cable before several things besides my linux partition got deleted).

Oh well, I learnt not to play around with chroots XD

edit:
Oh, and one more.
For some reason, all my USB ports outright stopped working in XP Home. This was really odd, and I was getting pretty confused, changed all the settings but nothing USB related was showing up in the device manager, reinstalled, nothing.
Turns out I'd loaded a failsafe profile for my bios, as the ram had messed up or something, and this turned off USB ports, go figure.

[YourSurrogateGod]

This is a story I heard, about a tech support guy who got fired over the incident.
Basically, an older lady was having difficulty getting her computer going. Since I don't have a link to an article about it, I can't say for sure, but I think it was a Microsoft tech support line, and naturally she thought Windows was her computer. You can believe this story or not.
The convo went something like this:
techguy "When the computer boots up, what do you see?"
oldlady "Hold on, I have to go back and try it again. It wasn't working before"
waiting waiting waiting
oldlady "OK, I'm at the computer now, but when I push the on button, nothing happens. The computer just sits there."
techguy "OK, can you see if the power cord is plugged into the back of the computer?"
oldlady "I don't know, there are all kinds of wires and things coming out of it."
more back and forth like this
techguy "Ok, Ok, we've figured out which one is the power cord right? (getting impatient and a little sarcastic) Now check to make sure that the power cord is plugged into both the wall and the computer."
oldlady "Oh, OK, just hold on for a minute, I have to get a flashlight?"
techguy "A flashlight? Why do you need a flash light?"
oldlady "Oh because the power has been out for a while so I can't see hardly anything in the dark!"
techguy ".................."
Use your imagination to decide what the tech support guy said to get fired..
Hmm, sounds like an urban legend.

[YourSurrogateGod]

We've all had them . . . those moments when we've done some really silly things only to have a forehead-slapping moment of clarity during which we hoped that no one had witnessed our efforts of moments before. Share yours!

Sadly, my folder of doofus moments is pretty large.

I'll share this one:
I had received a new case and wanted to transfer my existing components into the new case. The new case had 6 fans, not counting the HSF and power supply. It was a full-size tower case and weighed a lot.

I spent a long time taking the components out of the old case. I put the motherboard into the new case and slowly put things back together, heat sink/fan, hard drives, CD-Rom, DVDr, etc.

I closed up the case, hooked up the mouse, keyboard, monitor, speakers and the other peripherals. Then, with great anticipation, I pressed the power button. Nothing. Zip, nada, not-gonna-work. Maybe I missed something? I opened the case and saw the power indicator light on the mother board. It was shining a nice healthy green. Maybe it was the power switch? Maybe that was what was bad?

I must have fussed with it for 30 minutes trying this and that before I saw the memory sticks lying next to a screwdriver. Yeah, the memory sticks I had forgotten to install.

D'oh! #-o
That's pretty damn funny.

[chickengirl]

This is a story I heard, about a tech support guy who got fired over the incident.
Basically, an older lady was having difficulty getting her computer going. Since I don't have a link to an article about it, I can't say for sure, but I think it was a Microsoft tech support line, and naturally she thought Windows was her computer. You can believe this story or not.
The convo went something like this:
techguy "When the computer boots up, what do you see?"
oldlady "Hold on, I have to go back and try it again. It wasn't working before"
waiting waiting waiting
oldlady "OK, I'm at the computer now, but when I push the on button, nothing happens. The computer just sits there."
techguy "OK, can you see if the power cord is plugged into the back of the computer?"
oldlady "I don't know, there are all kinds of wires and things coming out of it."
more back and forth like this
techguy "Ok, Ok, we've figured out which one is the power cord right? (getting impatient and a little sarcastic) Now check to make sure that the power cord is plugged into both the wall and the computer."
oldlady "Oh, OK, just hold on for a minute, I have to get a flashlight?"
techguy "A flashlight? Why do you need a flash light?"
oldlady "Oh because the power has been out for a while so I can't see hardly anything in the dark!"
techguy ".................."
Use your imagination to decide what the tech support guy said to get fired..

This is actually based on a true story - it was a young lady, not an old lady, and the tech didn't do anything wrong, although he wanted to. ;)

Snopes article (http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperf.htm)
The original story (http://www.progress.demon.co.uk/Fun/Trouble-with.html)

[futz]

A few weeks ago I pulled a real stupid one. On one of my machines I have those snap-in blank back panel covers. For some reason I had snapped the one above the video card in from the inside of the case (DO NOT DO THIS!!!)

Anyway, I was messing with something and didn't notice the snap-in cover falling into the case... right on the video card!! I saw the monitor go blank, but thought it had just gone into power save mode. Then I think to myself, "I smell smoke? Naaa. Just my imagination..."

Anyway, scratch one ATI Radeon 9800 Pro.

[raptros-v76]

a friend of mine once managed to somehow f#$@ up his system with an ubuntu alternate cd. he had installed an extra hard drive, and had borrowed my alternate cd to try and partition the added disk, but somehow, he ended up installing part of dapper over his breezy system. i spent an hour of insanity trying to unbreak his system by trying to get the insane dependency requirements for reinstalling xserver-xorg to go away. have you ever seen a kernel panic mode? so finally, i commented out half of his sources.lst and suddenly, it worked. i could have saved myself so much time if i had done that at the beginning

[YourSurrogateGod]

Anyway, I was messing with something and didn't notice the snap-in cover falling into the case... right on the video card!!
Could you elaborate more? I'm having a hard time imagining the horror of it.

[raptros-v76]

that sound like hell in a handbasket! one powered card touching another? fire extinguisher time, maybe?

[futz]

Could you elaborate more? I'm having a hard time imagining the horror of it.
Just a piece of metal laying across the top of the video pc board. All the solder joints are on top - components on bottom, so the metal piece shorted two or more connections together and fried some parts. It didn't make a sound and only a slight wiff of smell, but the vid card never worked again.

Sad. Even though it was obsolete, it was still a pretty decent card. Those 9800 Pro's were top of the heap for almost a full year before Nvidia got their act together and beat ATI again.

Ah well... A good excuse to buy a nice modern new card.

[Lux Perpetua]

I have several of my own. :)

I was drunk once and managed to do sudo rm -rf /. Luckily, I had a recent backup of /home.I had a similar experience, but (1) I was completely sober, and (2) I did not have a recent backup. I was actually at work. My work directory would periodically become clogged with core dumps (which IIRC have names like core.984802) from my failed programming, and I would then get rid of them with a quick rm core*. This time, I accidentally typed rm core *. Note the extra space? Cleaned out several weeks of C++ code. From that point on, I have always aliased rm to rm -i.

I think I might win this one.
This was a ways back in Win95 days. I was trying to play something with sound on the pootah and for some reason was getting no sound whatsoever. Now my speakers were part of the monitor so I knew they were on. I went through 2 hours of diagnostics and damn near reinstalling Windows. Then by accident I hit the volume knob and sound magically appeared, turns out that thing was in what would pretty much be the off position (it was an analog wheel).
That one was the worst I can remember.Been there. I was trying to play MP3s from my computer by connecting the headphone jack on my laptop to the audio input of my Bose radio. I had to do it with a two-piece cable going across the room. No matter what I did, the radio was silent. The radio was set to accept the input, and the computer was playing my music, and all parts of the cable appeared to be in working order and connected correctly. I drove myself batty before I realized that the volume on the radio was set so low that I just couldn't hear it.

And another: I wrote a program once to display fractals using two back ends: OpenGL output to a window and dump to a BMP file. For some reason, the colors on the BMP file were always worse than the corresponding OpenGL graphics, when they should have been identical. The color on the BMP looked blocky when it should have been smooth. On closer inspection, OpenGL was dithering the picture and actually using fewer colors. Interesting. I implemented a dithering algorithm and decreased the color depth for my BMP; it looked better, but still not good enough. It eventually turned out that my display settings had the color depth set too low! There was nothing wrong with my "blocky" bitmaps; after raising the color depth, they looked as smooth as silk. I guess my OpenGL implementation was working with the low color depth and using a smart dithering algorithm to compensate.

[Lunixfanboy]

I had recently acquired a second hard drive, so was moving one of my distros to the second drive using cp -R * from / on the distro of choice. The distro lived in a fifteen gig partition, and three others lived in their own partitions and Windows got in there, too. So, /dev/hdb1 is receiving the output and it copies, and copies and copies and copies...et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. WHY is it taking so long to cp just over 4 gig to a new drive? Well, as it turns out, I have each of the three OTHER distro partitions mounted in fstab, AND the Windows partition as well, so I am effectively trying to cp a full 120 gig drive to a 30 gig drive. DOH!

[G Morgan]

My best one was only back in October. I had bought a copy of X3 and was eagerly anticipating my lastest bout of crushing the X universe beneath my corperate-military boot. Then of course I found that V1 barely worked.

I quickly went to their website and found V1.3 was already out and downloaded that. Then upon running the game I found nothing had changed. I was furious and was half way through writing a post on their forums explaining all my problems. I mentioned how sound was crackling and how no joysticks worked and went on to talk about horrendous inefficiency. Their game was released as Alpha and the patch did nothing to rectify this, a perfect example of where proprietry software is wrong.

Then I thought, did I actually run the patch?????

It's amazing. I've been intimate with the insides of my computers since the times I'd go bright red if a girl even talked to me but still make the most stupid of noobish mistakes. At least I realised before I put the post down and it does re-enforce the check everything first mentality.

[djheadley]

Yesterday I was transplanting all my drives (hd, cdrw, dvd) from my old machine to my new(er) one. I usually leave the cover off until I am sure it's going to work. Anyway, I got everything in and plugged in and booted. Nothing, no operating system! I tryed booting from the dvd drive (it's set up that way in bios) and still couldn't get anything. Not only did I NOT connect the power connecters to the hds but I had the cdrw set for slave and the dvd set as cable select.
:oops:
Anyway after roflmao at my stupidity I fixed it and everything (almost) worked. I did have to reconfigure xorg. BTW, I have been working on computers since CP/M and TI99 and running dual boot WinME and Ubuntu for about a year.

[YourSurrogateGod]

Yesterday I was transplanting all my drives (hd, cdrw, dvd) from my old machine to my new(er) one. I usually leave the cover off until I am sure it's going to work. Anyway, I got everything in and plugged in and booted. Nothing, no operating system! I tryed booting from the dvd drive (it's set up that way in bios) and still couldn't get anything. Not only did I NOT connect the power connecters to the hds but I had the cdrw set for slave and the dvd set as cable select.
:oops:
Anyway after roflmao at my stupidity I fixed it and everything (almost) worked. I did have to reconfigure xorg. BTW, I have been working on computers since CP/M and TI99 and running dual boot WinME and Ubuntu for about a year.
You run Windows ME?

Another story. While trying to install Gentoo (yes, it was a pain in the ***), I did mke2fs /hdaX, turns out that that partition that I formatted was my NTFS partition. I've effectively rendered my computer without a single OS to boot from. Yay. Lesson of the day? When doing computer work, make sure that you have a sufficient amount of caffeine in you. I tried to do this early in the morning.

[MrChips]

I will get scolded for this...

Luckily I was working with a junky comp, pentium 90mhz. The case was a mess, wires were everywhere. A little work later after I thought I had everything hooked back up, I tried to fire it up. The BIOS couldn't find the HD, now why was that? I had the case open so I noticed that I had left the power cord to the HD disconnected.

but that's not the bad part....

So in my impatience, I neglected to turn the power off and grab the wires to hook the HD back up. Something snagged the wire and the power cord contacted a prong on the mobo. The beeper made the most awful noise as everything went dead. I've never heard a computer scream before that... :/

Doofus

[3rdalbum]

Last night, when I was trying to make a Damn Small laptop talk to Ubuntu through Samba, I tried setting my computer's hostname to nothing. I remembered too late that would prevent the sudo command from working, so then I wouldn't be able to get into the control panel or the file to fix it!

(I ended off using Recovery Mode to edit the /etc/hostname file... but I felt like a doofus)

[benplaut]

I volunteer at the hospital's IT room, and am currently working on inventory.

Mark them down, put in the boot-n-nuke floppy, wipe them, then take out all the ram and hdd. One of these machines was missing the button to eject the floppy, and we needed it for more machines (you know how hard it is to find working floppies in an IT room...).

NEVER EVER try to push the eject button with a screwdriver. NEVER. (you get the idea).

Luckily, they were crap IBMs running NT3 :)

in terms of software, i decided to install my first linux without learning about hdxX structure. d'oh.

[richbarna]

I travelled about 45 km's to a friends place to install xp for him, he had an old box with an old 14" monitor. I could NOT get xp to install, every time the set up got to configuring hardware , it just froze.
So I went through the motions of unplugging everything, no go. He said that it might be the hard drive and went and bought another one as he could do with the extra space (€80). No go, still stopping on the hardware config during setup. The only piece of old hardware connected was the monitor, so deciding he could do with a bigger screen, ran up the shop and came back with a new monitor (€100 second-hand). Guess what? bloody thing still did the same thing, so I openned the box, pulled out everything and put it all back, plugged in and unplugged everything again, no go.
By now, I am going nuts, and my friend has lost the best part of €180 plus no internet connection all day.
I had arrived at 9.00 in the morning and left at 8.00 in the evening extremely p*ss+d off, and said I would be back the next day (Sunday).
I took my laptop for him to use, and spent another whole day changing stuff, only to go home without having been able to install a stupid bloody Xp cd (which I have done 100's of).
The next day my friend called a smarmy git-faced stuck-up *sshole computer fix repair man. (as I like to call him :))

He tried the cd, saw that it wouldn't boot, looked inside the box and made some sarcastic comment about how tidy the cables are, booted to the BIOS, disabled the antivirus and install Xp in exactly 54 minutes.

B+St*RD

God I was livid at myself

[matthew]

I was running Ubuntu (5.10 at the time) and wanted the latest and best audio codecs, etc. I added some Debian repos to my sources.list to get them. This would have been well and good if I had just stopped at one or two useful files (you know which ones they are!). However, I wasn't satisifed. I started to notice other things I wanted, but I needed to upgrade some dependencies. I added Debian Sid repos as well to get those dependencies. The end result, after a long evening of playing around with stuff and upgrading things I knew better than to upgrade I ended up unable to even get grub to load. Well, that was the night I reinstalled from scratch and updated to 6.06 via apt-get dist-upgrade right afterward. :) The good news was that I had a totally intact /home partition as well as a recent backup just in case.

Let this be a lesson to you: don't add foreign repos, or at least only download one or two things from them if you do and be satisfied. LOL

[christhemonkey]

One time i got bored on my dads old laptop running windows 98 SE,
The hard drive was getting full,
so i got a bit carried away deleting stuff, eventually deleted explorer.exe...
Which really wasnt so good!

After a couple of hours of crawling round under my desk looking through all my old CDs that had fallen behind it, found the 98 install cd and did a quick reinstall, my dad never noticed, so its ok..... :D

[bruce89]

He tried the cd, saw that it wouldn't boot, looked inside the box and made some sarcastic comment about how tidy the cables are, booted to the BIOS, disabled the antivirus and install Xp in exactly 54 minutes.
I've never heard of a computer rejecting Windows XP as a virus!

[Mr.X]

30 minutes ago I accidently formatted my downloads partition that ive been adding to for 9 months. Woops :P.

[-deadcats]

Tossed my wife's Windows notebook out the window--from a couple floors up. Windows goes through windows, but Windows doesn't fly very well.

But you gotta give it to Dell. Screen's busted all to 'ell, but still works like a champ. Makes a nice file server now...

[lazyd2]

30 minutes ago I accidently formatted my downloads partition that ive been adding to for 9 months. Woops :P.Ouch!!! I feel you
Last year I "managed" to delete 300 gigs of movies, music, documentaries etc :-s:D

[richbarna]

I've never heard of a computer rejecting Windows XP as a virus!

Me either, tell me about it !! but apparently because the BIOS antivirus check was on, it stopped the install, my friend showed me later when he did a dual-boot xp on a seperate partition. As I said, I have installed hundreds and I never heard of this until that day.
Lol, it's almost as if the BIOS was screaming No! No! if you put that xp on me I will get infected !.:)

extract from :-
http://www.updatexp.com/rstrui-exe-entry-point-not-found.html

Perform a Repair install of windows XP
**************************************

1. First, disable any Anti-Virus program and BIOS-level Anti-Virus protection.

2. Make sure you have set your CD-ROM as the first priority boot device. You may
refer to your computer manual for information on how to do this.

3. Insert the Windows XP CD into your CD-ROM and reboot your computer.

[G Morgan]

I was running Ubuntu (5.10 at the time) and wanted the latest and best audio codecs, etc. I added some Debian repos to my sources.list to get them. This would have been well and good if I had just stopped at one or two useful files (you know which ones they are!). However, I wasn't satisifed. I started to notice other things I wanted, but I needed to upgrade some dependencies. I added Debian Sid repos as well to get those dependencies. The end result, after a long evening of playing around with stuff and upgrading things I knew better than to upgrade I ended up unable to even get grub to load. Well, that was the night I reinstalled from scratch and updated to 6.06 via apt-get dist-upgrade right afterward. :) The good news was that I had a totally intact /home partition as well as a recent backup just in case.

Let this be a lesson to you: don't add foreign repos, or at least only download one or two things from them if you do and be satisfied. LOL

You realise you can use apt pinning in order to limit upgrades to only one or two packages. If you load Sid and then simply apt-get upgrade you would be in serious trouble since Sid is the testing repository rather than the unstable one.

[matthew]

You realise you can use apt pinning in order to limit upgrades to only one or two packages. If you load Sid and then simply apt-get upgrade you would be in serious trouble since Sid is the testing repository rather than the unstable one.Yeah...I got carried away, though, and upgraded more than 1 or 2 packages.

I've run Sid on my testbox just for fun. It wasn't a misunderstanding on my part, it was a foolish decision to mix Debian and Ubuntu repos. :oops:

[Biltong (Dee)]

NEVER EVER try to push the eject button with a screwdriver. NEVER. (you get the idea).


...Or using a long thin hairgrip.
Luckily my brother fixes computers for a living :-)

[G Morgan]

Yeah...I got carried away, though, and upgraded more than 1 or 2 packages.

I've run Sid on my testbox just for fun. It wasn't a misunderstanding on my part, it was a foolish decision to mix Debian and Ubuntu repos. :oops:

Thats always the temptation to go nuts and drag everything in. Personally I used the Debian unstable repos with Mepis at one point and found no problem even without apt pinning. It was amazing that it worked though. The problem with Mepis is it was difficult to remove their implementation of the Nvidia drivers (not sure how they do it but its not standard) and I had difficulty finding the source for their kernel (was a story on /. about this, they thought they were covered by Debian on this) so had real trouble when trying to enable kqemu on their distro. I either lost Nvidia or couln't get reasonable speeds in Qemu.

[MikePnKY]

Just now had one!!

I booted up Xubuntu on my laptop, and.....my desktop wallpaper was gone. I was immediately ticked that after all the bragging that I'd done on it, it was getting all XP with my wallpaper.

Uh...when I checked the file, yesterday, while I was doing a batch rename of some photos from the camera's DCS filename to a #/date/time filename.....I renamed the wallpaper file too..

Duh!

[Skye]

My favorite stupid move was while working on a computer for a friend of mine. I had come over to his house in the afternoon, after work, in order to install linux on one drive, and windows on another. Sinple enough, right? Not.

I went from 4pm to 2 am working on that computer, with no luck. Grub just wouldn't accept booting to windows, at all. So I slept over at his house, and got up to work on it again at 8. For some reason, I had unplugged the linux drive the night before, and I had booted the computer before I realized that the boot drive was missing. Being the 1/2 awake genius that I was, I decided to try and plug the molex connector for the drive in during the split second while power is off during a reboot.

Let me tell you, that arc woke me right up, and scared the crap out of me to boot. Worse yet, the computer wouldn't boot. Feeling that I had definitely fried his PC, I cleared the stored energy in the PSU, unplugged everything, and plugged everything back in. And, it worked fine, and is still working fine to this day. (I did eventually straighten out the grub problem.) Sometime you just get lucky...

[Derek Djons]

Well, I guess my doofus moment was a real pain in the *** for me. I worked for four years at the same employer under different company names. I've build up a good relationship with him and I got some priviliges others couldn't enjoy.

So one day, after working over for almost two weeks I asked if I could have a Radeon 9800PRO 128MB for free. Sure he replied, and it was mine. Back at the time it were very hard to get videocards. So I was really proud owning one and having paid jack for it.

At our shop we also replaced videocard fans for heatpipes and other (Zalman) solutions. At the time I didn't found it necessary to replace mine. One day, already not working at the shop because I found a better job which pays more I decided to replace my fan for a Zalman fan. The stock fan was making too much noise.

What do you think!!!

For four years straight I've never EVER screwed up a videocard, and I really mean never EVER. But on that day I scratched over my own 9800pro and it was instantly DEAD! I think I left my skill back at the shop when I left there :-s

[Reshin]

Found out the hard way about the option in norton ghost that makes the restored image take the whole disk instead of replacing that certain partition.

After that, I started keeping back-ups on a separate harddrive instead of on a partition on the same drive

*sigh*

[insane_alien]

My old boss's compter suffered a massive coffee related hardware failureand he got a new one on the cheap cos it had a suckily small harddrive (5GB). the old drive had escaped the coffee onslaught so i said i'd transfer it. now, the two drives look pretty similar and i stupidly had them lying next to each other. i went to take a leak came back put a drive in and threw the other one away. guess which drive i threw away.

[Rumor]

My old boss's compter suffered a massive coffee related hardware failure

I hope it was not a cup of Kona, or Kenyan AA. Some losses hurt more than others.
:)

[raffytaffy]

i had my old laptop in a foreign country..and forgot to get an adapter 120volts american / 240 volts theirs...fried it

[benplaut]

I hope it was not a cup of Kona, or Kenyan AA. Some losses hurt more than others.
:)

eh... kona is the cheapest coffee around where i come from :twisted:

[3rdalbum]

I just remembered one I had a month or so ago. I'd bought the latest Linux Format magazine, which had SimplyMepis as the coverdisc. So I started it up.

I tried setting up my internet connection, but no matter what I tried I couldn't get Konqueror to connect to anything. Then I tried starting Amarok, but although it said it was playing my MP3s, I couldn't hear anything.

So I thought "this is crap", and stopped using it. I booted back into Ubuntu and found that I was still getting no sound and no Internet connection.

At some point in time, I had disconnected my speakers, and my father had the Internet connection plugged into his computer instead of mine.

[Polygon]

following someones advice to download this suspicious non professsional program that would revert my windows xp box's directX installation back to version 8 from version 9.0c. boy was that a mistake.

It turns out it did not revert it, but it managed to delete some important registry keys which told windows what version of directx i had, so basically every video game crashed with an error cause they couldent tell what directx version i had. and when i tried to install directx again, the stupid installer would download everything, and quit out. not install anything. i had to reformat and reinstall windows to get out of that one.

[Titus A Duxass]

My home theatre PC was really peeing me off. Every time I disconnected power and then reconnected the BIOS had to be reset. This occured after I put the new battery on the motherboard.

It went on for weeks.

Yep you guessed it right! I put the battery in upside down!

[Rumor]

eh... kona is the cheapest coffee around where i come from :twisted:

Bah. There was one place around here (Albany, NY) that carried it. Real kona, not a blend. It was around $20/pound. They don't carry it anymore because it didn't sell.

[RavenOfOdin]

I got a programming one.

#define MAX 100
...
struct * stuff = malloc(sizeof(MAX));
=============================
for(int O = 0; O < 10; 0++) // <--- the last part is a zero, not an 'O', afterwards, I've never used neither 'O' nor 'o' in a for-loop, ever.

Lol!

Niiice one.



Luckily I was working with a junky comp, pentium 90mhz. The case was a mess, wires were everywhere. A little work later after I thought I had everything hooked back up, I tried to fire it up. The BIOS couldn't find the HD, now why was that? I had the case open so I noticed that I had left the power cord to the HD disconnected.

but that's not the bad part....

So in my impatience, I neglected to turn the power off and grab the wires to hook the HD back up. Something snagged the wire and the power cord contacted a prong on the mobo. The beeper made the most awful noise as everything went dead. I've never heard a computer scream before that... :/


Does it sound something like "holy crap, time to empty your bank account?" :D

Anyway. . .IF I can recall them. . .

1) One time while I was still using Windows XP, the computer got infected. With a virus. Yes, I know, I scanned my stuff heaps and never opened suspect emails, etc etc etc. But, I also had a habit of downloading stuff from dodgy sites. So. . .this virus would keep on replicating itself and I'd find all these garbage files in my directories like "ironchef.ico", "wet hot xxx.ico", "******.ico", and so on. I'd managed to clean the virus before it did too much damage, but some of these little files still remained. Some of these little files still remained in my C:\WINDOWS and C:\WINDOWS\System directories.

So, on a hunt for garbage files to delete, I had "show hidden files" and as you can imagine, "enable display of protected operating system folders", on. I saw all these little files in my Windows directories which looked like c_####.nls.

I thought they were garbage, and I deleted them.
Needless to say, someone had to come over and repair the XP install because from that point on it wouldn't work.

Not good.

2) Way back when, I was routinely going to a hacker site/forum to learn stuff. Unfortunately, it had more its share of black hats than the other two kinds. I gave out my AIM account name on there (double ouch, both for using AIM and for doing . . .that. . . where I did it, of all places) and some guy messaged me one day. I don't have the conversation logs from that long ago at hand, it was 4 computers past - but to sum it all up, this guy said he was responsible for an FBI server crash 3 years ago from that date. We were chatting for a while and then he gives me this link, telling me to click it. . .it leads to the "You are an Idiot!" Java spam.

I then freak out and think he's trying to root my windows box, and I'm cussing at him like nothing else. :p

The boxes did nothing more than slow down the computer and make a whole lot of windows appear on the taskbar. Boy, did I feel like a moron.

3) Another programming one. . .I tried making dual projects inside my compiler, one for a main application and the other for a server. The two showed up in different folders with the name "main.cc".

I wanted all my applications to be inside one folder for easy access, so I went ahead and outside of my compiler, put the newly created main.cc from my secondary app over the one I was already working on . . .

THREE WHOLE MONTHS of work down the drain.

Let that be a lesson to y'all. . .Back up often. :p

[_simon_]

Many, many years ago I decided to build my very first pc.

I was very proud of myself, I obtained all the parts from a computer market, assembled it all following some instructions in a "how to build pc's" type paper manual.

So there it sat.. all put together and wired up... hit the power button, the screen lit up and started to POST then nothing. Tried again... POST... nothing. No error beeps, just started to POST then switched off.

After a good 6 hours of pulling my hair out, cursing and on the verge of tears from frustration I powered my old PC up and connected to the internet for help. I found a site that had detailed step by step instructions with pictures on how to assemble a pc... it all looked just like it did in my manual but wait... what were those small brass coloured screw things? I recognise those... I looked through the little packet of left over screws that came with the PC case and sure enough there they were... as I looked at the picture of where they should go, the full horror of what I had done struck me... I had screwed the motherboard flat to the pc case!!! DOH!

After pulling everything out and refitting it all, this time WITH the motherboard spacers I pressed the power button with trembling fingers... to my shear relief it POSTED and booted fine!

[picpak]

I once wrecked my XP kernel just to get a new bootsplash.