What is the worst/dumbest computer mistakes you have ever done?

[Lord Xeb]

Mine was when I tried to install DSL on a pen drive and put the .ISO in program files e_e The computer got confuse and it couldn't find the MBR... Also, it was his corporate computer.

[Kingsley]

I downloaded some program from a shady website because it promised to give me lots of good items in an online game I used to play. The program turned out to be a keylogger. My game account was hacked and I lost all my valuable items. This was 5 or 6 years ago.

[starcannon]

I spilled a beer on my brand new averatec *sic* laptop a few years back, that hosed the keyboard, it had burn marks and everything. I bought another keyboard on ebay for $75 I think it was.

[Bubba64]

Answering any of this posters threads!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
None of which is marked solved. I think it's called enabling.



:lolflag:

[FuturePilot]

Tried to connect to the internet and wonder why it wasn't working. After 5 minutes I noticed the cable was unplugged. #-o

[myusername]

i used windows...

[lisati]

This goes back a few years: I put together a collection of programs for a community group to help them manage their client database, using a mixture of compiled BASIC and assembler. It was a magnificent effort, considering I didn't have much experience programming for MS-DOS or for the x86 family of CPUS - I even managed to get the program to automatically adjust to their system having a colour display and mine having a monocrhome display. One thing I forgot to check was the CPU - my system at the time had a 286, theirs had an NEC V20 (or some such weird one which worked a bit like an 80186 with a few unusual bells and whistles added in for good measure). Net result: one scrambled database when their machine encountered some '286 opcodes that worked a bit differently on their machine. Just as well I had a backup which I'd made for testing purposes, which saved several hours of typing!

[Chilli Bob]

I got a new computer (Windows) at work in January. Ever since I have been swearing at it because I can't get the sound to work through my external speakers. I've been blaming the Realtek surround sound setup utility for stuffing it up. This was driving me mad because I love listening to internet radio at work. Finally last Friday I was moving my desk and realised the plug I had inserted into the line-out on the PC belonged not to my speakers, but was attached to my monitor cable. (Apparently the monitors have built in speakers that you have to turn on from the set-up menu.)

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

[chucky chuckaluck]

although nothing has gone wrong, i don't think it was wise of me to ever work on my neighbors' computers. other than helping setup anti-virus or getting rid of spyware, i pretty much avoid it now.

[Xzallion]

I once tried to install Gentoo and for some reason didn't back up like I normally do. Long story short, wiped everything. Graduation pictures, Vacation pictures, some artwork I had been working on and some writing. I had no physical graduation pictures, or vacation pictures and couldn't afford to have a data recovery company pull them off the drive, and I couldn't make the few tools I could find to work.

It really sucked, but I knew better. I should of backed my data up like I normally do.

I also spent almost two hours troubleshooting networking and internet problems before I realized I had unplugged the ethernet cable from my computer. This was a few years ago, and boy did I feel stupid.

[billgoldberg]

When I installed ubuntu gutsy, I forgot to back up my data.

150gb of data lost, haha, I still have to hear about that one from my roommate (who is also my twin-brother) from time to time.

When I was a year or 14 I also trashed the windows pc once, I wasn't computer savvy enough at the time to fix my mistakes so we had to bring it to the shop, where they charged a lot do a clean install and install some drivers.

[EMCGFX]

i used windows...

I agree with myusername ;-) :lolflag:

[beercz]

I can only refer you to this (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1019203&postcount=45).

[lisati]

I can only refer you to this (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1019203&postcount=45).

Reminds me of the time I had a hand-held from Casio back in the 80s - it worked well until I dropped it and the stepped on it.

[wdaniels]

I got the power supply for my router mixed up with the one from my laptop. There was smoke coming out of the router before I noticed. I was really upset :(

[EMCGFX]

@beercz, WOW this is the best so far =D LOL

[jethro10]

Not me really but,
Im left handed and have 5 servers in a row at work, all with the mouse on the left. One (right handed) woman at worked wanted something or other and I told her to use a certain machine. She spent 5 minutes not getting the mouse to work. It worked OK on its 'correct' PC though for me :-)

J

[beercz]

@beercz, WOW this is the best so far =D LOL
Thanks - I suppose it was pretty dumb of me!

[Ozor Mox]

Lol beercz, I suppose you were lucky it didn't go up in flames while you weren't there really!

My entries:

When I first started using Ubuntu, I messed up my /etc/network/interfaces file, so I figured hey I'll just delete it, when I reboot Ubuntu will create a new one with the default settings. Of course I was wrong, and as a result of having no loopback interface, my computer would no longer boot. Not knowing any better, I had to do a reinstall.

I also broke Ubuntu so that I couldn't log in, and ran sudo rm -rf on a directory at the command line because it was the only remove command I could remember. I just forgot the reason I could remember it, until it was part way through and I did a control-C in a mad panic! Nothing was lost, thankfully, since it was deleting the right directory.

[Stefanie]

when i was like 10 years old i reset our windows 98 computer to factory settings. windows got removed entirely, the computer wasn't usable anymore and my mom spent 3 hours on the phone talking to an IT guy who tried to tell her how to fix it :-)

last year i had a problem with my scanner, i think there were bars over my images. after 2 hours of installing and reinstalling all kinds of drivers i realised that maybe i should close the curtains to prevent the sunlight from messing up the scans :-)

[brunovecchi]

Three years ago my dad gave me a new computer that, surprisingly, had linux preinstalled. I can't remember which distro because, at that time, I didn't know anything about linux. Needless to say, instead of fiddling a little bit with the thing, I just formatted the hard drive and installed Windows XP. A year later I realized what a huge mistake that was!

[rickyjones]

A customer's PC needed a hard drive swap, so I was working on cloning her current hard drive to the new one. Long story short, I selected the wrong source/target drives in Norton Ghost. Realized my mistake after about 10 seconds but it was too late. The partition table on her old drive was gone and data was already being overwritten.

Learned from that mistake, I always triple check my source and destination items in ANY operation.

-Richard

[Barrucadu]

I tried juggling a balloon filled with water in the same room as my laptop and a collection of books. I can't juggle to save my life, books have rather angular corners, and laptops don't cope well with lots of water.
I'm sure you can figure out the rest.

[Bubba64]

I tried juggling a balloon filled with water in the same room as my laptop and a collection of books. I can't juggle to save my life, books have rather angular corners, and laptops don't cope well with lots of water.
I'm sure you can figure out the rest.

:lolflag:


I'm not laughing at you, but towards you.

[manicman]

About a year ago I need to format one of my drives so I opened up fdisk and proceded to format /dev/sdb1. What I didnt realise was the terminal i was using was sshed into my server and I lost a lot of valuable information.

[wdaniels]

About a year ago I need to format one of my drives so I opened up fdisk and proceded to format /dev/sdb1. What I didnt realise was the terminal i was using was chrooted into my server and I lost a lot of valuable information.

lol, that's a good one :D I'm sure I've done something similar actually with a remote shell, but obviously less drastic or I would remember what it was!

[beercz]

I tried juggling a balloon filled with water in the same room as my laptop and a collection of books. I can't juggle to save my life, books have rather angular corners, and laptops don't cope well with lots of water.
I'm sure you can figure out the rest.
I guess we have both learnt that laptops and water do not mix! Especially when they are turned on.

[Ozor Mox]

I guess we have both learnt that laptops and water do not mix! Especially when they are turned on.

Actually Barrucadu learnt that, you learnt that laptops and very high temperatures do not mix! ;)

[beercz]

Actually Barrucadu learnt that, you learnt that laptops and very high temperatures do not mix! ;)
True, sooo true! You got me there!

btw I am glad I am not the only person who has done something stupid with a computer!!!

[DiscoKiller]

I used to have an old pentium 75 in a little ATX case, on the front was a key switch (which i suppose at one time locked something or other in the computer)....i have to this day to work out what it and the 'turbo' button along side it are for...anyhoo, i decided one day that...
'hmmm that key switch could be used to stop anyone else using my computer...i`ll wire it to the PSU'
....you know that wire that comes with those little 'electronics in action' kits you had as a kid? it was kinda the same grade as that (basically metal fluff wrapped in sellotape) and so i ended up with a nice little sparky/flamey display and one very burnt out PSU. thankfully i was working as a refuse collector at the time and a couple of old computers showed up in someones rubbish. a screwdriver and a bit of effort later i had a fully working system again. I can only assume the motherboard was humed from solid granite!

That and....

while at uni my computer got cut off from the internet. I found a virus which i thought may have been the cause and ran several scans and what have you till i was sure it was gone. Still no internet. I thought maybe i hadnt got the whole of the virus or something or the previous one had brough more in with or or whatever (yeah i was using windows). So in the end i wiped my 120gig hard drive which was full of music, pictures, work and movies (all just back ups...honest...) and did a full reinstall of windows....Still no internet, only then did i decide to ring the network admin to find out why i had no connection...his reply?

'hi, what's your username?'
'DKxxxx'
'ah yes, we disconnected you because you have a virus'
'oh, i got rid of that almost immediately'
'oh right, well i reconnect you then'
'thanks....what?'
'yeah we switched your connection off completely'
'and didnt tell me?'
'oh yeah, sorry about that...'

the conversation ended abruptly with no expletives uttered, which i think is an acheivement...I only really have myself to blame, not like the guy could have emailed me!

[Magnes]

I deleted wrong partition. I thought I had only one 15GB partition, so I removed the first one. I discovered the truth when I tried to mount the disk. Fortunately the EasyRecovery helped recover most (but not all) of the data I had there.

[Rhubarb]

Unfortunantly I can't claim this story to be my own, but a friend of mine:-

One late night my friend was doing an assignment for school, he was up very late and was getting quite tired.
He accidentally dropped some paper on the floor, so to correct this he grabbed the mouse and went to Edit --> Undo.
At that moment he realised he was very sleepy.

Like a few people here, I did manage to lose a significant amount of non-backed up holiday photos and other less important media. So now I backup like crazy.

[Methuselah]

Bought a computer with Windows Millenium on it.

[HangukMiguk]

1. Deleted Recycle Bin on Windows '95.
2. 7 years ago, got into an argument with my mom trying while trying to shutdown and move my computer. Wound up getting so engrossed in the argument, that after shut down, I grabbed the tower, forgot to unplug any of the cables. I'll let you imagine the rest...

[HangukMiguk]

Bought a computer with Windows Millenium on it.
I didn't, my mom did. If I remember correctly, that was the argument.

[ubuntu-freak]

I accidently deleted the /usr/lib/icons folder, as I forgot to add the name of the icon theme I wanted to delete.

nAtHaN

[sweeneytodd]

deleted command.com in win98

[KingTermite]

Put together a simple batch file installer (Windows systems) for some home brew software at work. Of course it worked on MY pc because that's where I tested it. I asked my software lead if I could test it on his computer for a 2nd test, he said "sure".

The batch file looked for a certain directory (where our software was to install) and if it found the directory, it would delete all files recursively (and with FORCE and NOPROMPT arguments) before installing the new files.

I quickly found out that there were quirky differences between XP and 2000 versions of Windows. It did not find the directory on his computer and left itself in root directory, deleting recursively (with FORCE argument).

Not pretty.....luckily I CTL-BREAK'd out of it before it got to important files.



LESSON LEARNED:

NEVER EVER EVER EVER write a script that deletes ANYTHING recursively and forcefully. That should ALWAYS be done manually.

[MaximB]

About 10-12 years ago I had an XT machine with the green screen, about 64k of memory (because bill said this should be enough for everyone) and a DOS OS installed.
I was living in a place with no Internet connection and a very low population.
I and my friend (who thought that he knows jack about PC's) discovered the ONLY way to do a complete format.
But we had a no idea at the time what does it mean, he thought that if it's taking so much time (about an hour or two) and asks a lot of questions like "are you SURE you want to format drive C ?" it ought to be something good.
Then after a few hours we restarted the XT and...you guessed it - we had a brand "new" and fresh hard disk with no M$ SH*T on it ! but no OS either so it didn't boot at all ;)

The sad thing about it is that I trashed it to the big green garbage trunk.
If I would have kepet it till now, it could cost millions !

[Ponomous]

I was younger and got some viruses on my dads computer. in the process of trying to cover my tracks and kill the virus i managed to delete word, some drivers and half of his backed up data like old tax returns... i lost my 5$ allowance for like 3 years...

[Lord Xeb]

LOL, I have done about as badd. Once I tried to get my friend's USB to work and plugged in my 8GB pen drive to see if I got it right. Lets just say I it got really hot, then melted because I had the terminals on the mobo wrong... (i you put the usb connect on wrong it will fry your stuff)

[winsall]

when i first got a ubuntu live cd, i tried it out on my mums comp with out telling her, and i had to change the boot order to put CD DRIVE first. i didnt realize i put the primary HDD LAST and the slave HDD we salvaged from our last computer SECOND. anyway it was trying to boot from a windows that wasnt there. i didnt know what i had done, my mum freaked out, we got it fixed, and i got banned from the computer for a month (later shortened to 2 weeks)

[KiwiNZ]

Mine was when I agreed to fix my mother in laws PC ](*,)

[JT9161]

This wasn't to long ago but when I went to install Ubuntu on my desktop (my first experience w/ Linux) I didn't know about the RAM Limit and tried to use the regular Live CD on a computer with 256MB of RAM, Froze at 15% and killed the MBR also didn't back up all of my stuff but I got the important files.Soon after I got the alternate CD and went to town.

[NikoC]

In the ol' days, like 15 years ago I tried assembling for the first time my own pc... forgot to put these small plastic taps in the mainboard, so the complete backside of the board was in direct contact with the metal plating of the casing... sparky :) Got myself a new one for free though (no warranty issue what so ever!

[AndyCee]

Oh yeah...

Back when we got our first PC with windows 3.1, we had an 800MB hard disk. I was about 11. I was looking for files to delete to make more room, and found two large files which I didn't recognise, and deleted them.

After a few minutes, I noticed the CDROM wasn't working. I'd just deleted the drivers.

I managed to reinstall windows (all 12 floppy disks) before dinner, and before Ma 'n' Pa found out...

[jrusso2]

Usually forgetting to plug something in.

[jalvarez53]

downgrading xp pro. sp2 to Vista ultimate

[Paqman]

(i you put the usb connect on wrong it will fry your stuff)

You put the live on the earth? Ouch! :lolflag:

[ww711]

Deleting kde in /opt with out realising i was deleting the X-Windows manager, then rebooting to find I was in fvmw.

[DM was on fire!]

Mine was when I agreed to fix my mother in laws PC ](*,)

XD!

Trying to plug in a PS2 port mouse on my offline computer. I totally screwed the pins up in an attempt to plug it in. My dad had to take it and reform the pins by comparing it to one of our spare motherboards. XD

[rickyjones]

XD!

Trying to plug in a PS2 port mouse on my offline computer. I totally screwed the pins up in an attempt to plug it in. My dad had to take it and reform the pins by comparing it to one of our spare motherboards. XD

I've done the PIN issues thing many times, mainly on IDE devices.

-Richard

[zmjjmz]

Well, I have a Thinkpad 560 with nothing bootable except net, HDD, and FDD.
So I tried to do a poorman's install in DSL, and I kinda found out that when I formatted the HDD with cfdisk, I also deleted the DSL image I worked quite hard to put on there, along with Windows 95, which was the only thing that could connect to my PCMCIA CDROM, and thus was OS-less.
I got BasicLinux working on it recently, but I have yet to get that CD-R working with BasicLinux.
I may have to use Zip Drives, or connect it to the net.
Unfortunately my DWL-G650 (the wireless card for that thing) needs...
2.4.31, and BasicLinux has 2.2.16.
Oh well, I'll try.

[diablo75]

I replaced a power supply once before checking a surge protector, which was turned off...

I spent about half a day troubleshooting the sound on a laptop before determining the cause:

http://forums.techguy.org/attachments/132136d1211241724/volume.jpg
(I thought it only affected headphone output...)

I reinstalled Ubuntu on a friends laptop after failing to determine why his wireless card stopped working. After reinstall, it still didn't work. Turns out his BIOS had a setting that forced the card to be off until told to come on by the OS (I guess Ubuntu doesn't do this), so I disabled this feature, and that fixed it.

[Bill magee]

Many years ago my University had a Wang word-processing lab (I said it was many years ago!). After I copied my file onto my 8" floppy I deleted my hard-disk based copy with a*.*, thereby removing 1/26th of all files on the system. They had to bring in a Wang engineer from DC to restore the files.

[arkangel]

mistype

rm -rf * ~

instead of

rm -rf *~

[BDNiner]

When building my first computer i made 2 mistakes. First i put the raiser screws in every hole of the case. one of the screws didn't have a hole, instead it was coming into contact with the circuits on the underside of the motherboard. The second thing was my power supply was set to 220 volts from the factory. It took about 3 hours before i realized why the computer would not turn on.

[lisati]

Many years ago my University had a Wang word-processing lab (I said it was many years ago!). After I copied my file onto my 8" floppy I deleted my hard-disk based copy with a*.*, thereby removing 1/26th of all files on the system. They had to bring in a Wang engineer from DC to restore the files.

Wang! That name takes me back (as does the reference to 8" disks which I've seen but not used)...the first computer I had "hands on" experience was a Wang, the first one I owned was a Wang.....

But I digress from the thread topic........(does this count as sufficiently "dumb"?)

Keep on smiling, everyone!

[gameryoshi600]

deleted the recovery partition off of my computer
deleted my wireless driver
used windows

[arinlares]

on an old Windows 98, i tried to run MS Flight Simulator 9, after being attacked by a bunch of viruses. I crashed the computer, and instead of booting when I turned it on, it would just beep and show a blank screen.

[paul101]

in my experience, i find that laptops function much better with battery's!!

[whitegourd]

486DX2 when I first got an interest in computers. Took the CPU out just to look at it, and then putting it back in sideways. Turned the computer on and "BZZZZ!!!"... "ahh... I'll never ever forget that smell of burnt metal.

[gn2]

I managed to fit a DDR RAM module upside down in a desktop PC and totally fried the RAM and motherboard.

[-grubby]

Once I was trying to put in some RAM, had it backwards, pushed in too much (sort of forcing it since I was absolutely sure it was in right), and then broke the ram. Thank god it was just a junk computer I was working on, the particular stick of RAM I was putting in was only something like 64 to 128 MB

[markp1989]

mine was probable formating the wrong hard drive, i had two 40gb hard drives one for data and the other for the os, i was reinstalling an i selected the wrong drive to format

[Lord Xeb]

X.X Ouch, thats got to hurt. Did you have to get a new m/b?

[RSnowman]

I don't remember how I did it, but in 1987 I formatted the drive on my DOS XT. I'd bought the PC used and my boss at work had set it up for me. I was a fiction writer earning by bed and bread chopping onions and making sandwiches.

When I told him what I'd done, he said that if I was going to screw around I better learn what I was doing. Instead of fixing things for me, he gave me a stack of manuals and a couple of books.

21 years later I work for an international systems consulting firm as a technical lead on enterprise projects.

Go figger.

[IHATEDLINK]

Mine was when I tried to install DSL on a pen drive and put the .ISO in program files e_e The computer got confuse and it couldn't find the MBR... Also, it was his corporate computer.

Someone at the forums advise me to change to WCID or something like that, so I installed it and then removed Network Manager, but in reverse order! So I couldn't connect to the internet to download WCID, GREAT. ](*,) (WCID is a network manager).
Anyway, I took the opportunity to upgrade to 7.10 :P.
That's one of many screw ups... I burned a PC once, or at least a part of it! ;)

[schauerlich]

I'm a moderator on my friend's forum, and I was trying to play a prank on another friend by banning him while he was on the computer 5 feet away from me at school. Of course, I forgot that our school uses a proxy, and that when I IP banned him, I was effectively IP banning the whole school, including myself... I unbanned him as soon as I got home.

[Lord Xeb]

LOL. Currently I am going to go into the IT or IS field. I am following the footsteps of my mom. Also, computers are awesome.

[Lord Xeb]

Xd

[regomodo]

rebuilt the superblocks of an ext3 filesystem as if it was reiserfs. Bye,bye 200GB of data.

[Spike-X]

One late night my friend was doing an assignment for school, he was up very late and was getting quite tired.
He accidentally dropped some paper on the floor, so to correct this he grabbed the mouse and went to Edit --> Undo.

What a silly thing to do.

He should have just hit Ctrl-Z!

[uraldinho]

I almost got phished once.

I received a phishing email literally 10 seconds after making an online purchase. So, my first thought was that the email was genuine, and I clicked on the link, enter my password, etc....

It took me about 10 seconds to realise my mistake. The first thing I did was change my password that I had given to the phishing site.

I probably shouldn't mention the heated messages I have sent in the past. Now, if I write a heat of the moment message/email, I always double check it for political correctness.

[Dr Small]

I ignored visudo's warning and went ahead with the syntax wrong in /etc/sudoers! I couldn't use sudo anymore, lol.

[Gamma746]

# shred /dev/sdc
(Ten minutes later)
"$#%!, I meant /dev/sda!"

Fortunately I had RAID so I didn't lose anything, but still.

[Dr Small]

Once I was trying to put in some RAM, had it backwards, pushed in too much (sort of forcing it since I was absolutely sure it was in right), and then broke the ram. Thank god it was just a junk computer I was working on, the particular stick of RAM I was putting in was only something like 64 to 128 MB
I would give 50$ for one of those things!!

[init1]

I once tried chmoding my entire / 777. Nothing was lost, but it made the system unusable.

[herbster]

Yeeeears ago I ran game.exe someone sent me in a DCC transfer, it was my first week or so on the 'net (had moved on from BBSes boyeee!) and of course I ran it, to no avail. Only when a dialog box popped up saying "Get ready to restart mother [expletive]..." did I realize the lovely Back Orifice was upon me, a tool I'd end up using on many other peeps in harmless yet evil fun as time went by... :D

[zachtib]

when i was in middle school, i had a whole bunch of really old star wars pc games that I wanted to play at school, so I put in a floppy and copy pasted shortcuts to all my games onto it.

[Lord Xeb]

I remember I made a fake virus on my dad's computer and he got really pissed... (you know the kind that uses the command 'shutdown -s -t 120 -c "I HATE! NOW EAT BRICKS!!!!!!") that was fun trying to convince him it was even a virus. The IT guy even though it was a virus!! e_e idiots.

[unisol]

i accidently installed some longhorn files into xppro, which made it so it wouldnt run any of my wife's games. after an hour of editing, i got it back to normal.

[PmDematagoda]

In this case no harm was done, but I ran an fsck check on my external drive with Ext3, the only mess-up? I ran:-

sudo fsck -t vfat
the cream of the joke; I let it run and even let it fix some errors, and I even ran it again until I suddenly realised that the external had Ext3 and not FAT:-P.

[Barrucadu]

You ran fsck, which checks for filesystem errors, with the wrong filesystem type and everything didn't get destroyed and/or converted to FAT? Wow.

[scouser73]

I had a laptop a couple of years ago, one night I'd been out for a few drinks, I went into a chatroom and was just messing about, the next morning I went to open the laptop lid, only to discover I'd been sick on the keyboard, had closed the lid and left it. Well wiping the vomit from the screen was ok, but the keyboard was a different matter. Straight away I realised that some keys wouldn't work.

[PmDematagoda]

You ran fsck, which checks for filesystem errors, with the wrong filesystem type and everything didn't get destroyed and/or converted to FAT? Wow.

That what really surprised me, I thought the whole hard drive would be borked but it just wasn't.

[PmDematagoda]

I had a laptop a couple of years ago, one night I'd been out for a few drinks, I went into a chatroom and was just messing about, the next morning I went to open the laptop lid, only to discover I'd been sick on the keyboard, had closed the lid and left it. Well wiping the vomit from the screen was ok, but the keyboard was a different matter. Straight away I realised that some keys wouldn't work.

Forgive me, but didn't you realise that you were sick on the lappy just after you became sick?

[damis648]

I have no really big story but i have to say this is one of my favorite threads.:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:

[ubuntu-freak]

Forgive me, but didn't you realise that you were sick on the lappy just after you became sick?

That reminds me, accidently deleting /usr/lib/icons wasn't the worst mistake I ever made, spilling red wine on my XP laptop was. Thankfully it didn't kill it, but it smelt of warm red wine everytime I switched it on thereafter.

[PmDematagoda]

That reminds me, accidently deleting /usr/lib/icons wasn't the worst mistake I ever made, spilling red wine on my XP laptop was. Thankfully it didn't kill it, but it smelt of warm red wine everytime I switched it on thereafter.

Isn't that a plus point?;)

[ubuntu-freak]

Isn't that a plus point?;)

Haha, I guess it did add some character to an otherwise dull and slow laptop. :)

[scouser73]

Forgive me, but didn't you realise that you were sick on the lappy just after you became sick?
No, I was very, very drunk.

[Erdaron]

I've paid money for Suse Linux. I tried installing Vista on my computer, which made the computer essentially unusable and unstable. So I decided to give this Linux thing a go. I just happened to be in my university's bookstore, and they had boxed Suse 10 with a small manual for $60. I installed it, and it totally didn't work. And the manual was terrible. Then I found Ubuntu and rejoiced.

I've also deleted wireless drivers on my laptop thinking they were some stupid bloatware. I was mistaken.

Speaking of spilling stuff on your computer. My friend spilled a whole glass of water on his open-case desktop. And nothing happened. He just turned it off for a few hours. Lucky git.

[red_Marvin]

Once when I were inserting a soundcard, but I failed to push both ends of the card/connector into the isa slot. I think it killed the floppy controller.

[quanumphaze]

I have a D-link wireless router and DSL modem and this happened early last year.

I wanted to turn them both off but since I was lazy instead of crawling under the desk and switching them off at the wall outlet I just pulled out the power cables from the back. When it came time to power them back on, well they have different power ratings for their transformers, and the modem cable used a higher voltage. The router died, modem was fine.

Luckily it was still under warranty.

Then one time one of my friends had a virus that sent itself through MSN and gave a link to a "picture" and was convincing enough for me to click it. It downloaded a .com file which I actually thought was some weird problem so I tried to make it run as a jpeg file, but it still opened up in Wine.

That virus is getting garbage on the AppDB since it didn't work. I still removed my ~/.wine anyway.

[3rdalbum]

I think I've been comparatively un-dumb in my computing experiences.

I broke sudo once by changing my computer's hostname. Not dumb in itself, but I thought I could just get around it by chown'ing my whole hard disk to be owned by myself. Needless to say, although it didn't break anything, I still needed root.

I once wanted to dual-boot Mac OS 9 and 8.5. I already had 9 installed. I tried just dragging the System Folder across from my 8.5 CD, and then blessing this new System Folder. When I rebooted, it crashed with the message that the 8.5 System Folder would only work on the CD.

[shuttleworthwannabe]

Well, as previously warned, I have lost valuable data: I am distro-junkie and was installing a number of distro's without first backing up my data )on desktop manily). lost everything, to say the least. I then became brave and learnt about paritioning and creating a separate data folder...

Now I can format and install as much as I want without losing my DATA partition...touch wood!

[doorknob60]

Installed Vista :lolflag:

EDIT: Even worse, I installed the Vista beta on a computer with only 512 Mb of RAM, it was slow as hell, but I kept it (for some reason) for like 6 months. The good thing that came out of that was I found out about AVG (because Norton didn't work).

EDIT2:
In the ol' days, like 15 years ago I tried assembling for the first time my own pc... forgot to put these small plastic taps in the mainboard, so the complete backside of the board was in direct contact with the metal plating of the casing... sparky :) Got myself a new one for free though (no warranty issue what so ever!

I did that once, but it was like a year ago lol. It was on an old P3 mobo I bought on ebay for like 35$, and my dad bought me a new mobo with the same socket for 100$ and it was worse than the one I bought on ebay lol. It deosn't have built in ethernet, the onboard sound doesn't work, and any OS I put on it hangs during boot, making it take 3 mins to boot any OS despite it having a 1.3 ghz processor and 256 Mb of Ram...Oh well I don't use it, my brother does. It's running hapilly and quickly with Debian Lenny KDE :)

[_DD_]

Mine has to be trying to to Ctrl+C in the terminal (forgetting you couldn't do that in the terminal to copy) while something important is running. Damn those pesky ^C escape characters :D

[amar]

I attempted to delete all the backup files in a folder (ending ~) using "rm -r myfolder/*~"

I put a space in the wrong place and managed to delete all the files in the folder AND the backed up folder myfolderold/

DOH!

Spend the next day scouring my hard disk using grep, looking for fragments of the code and reconstructing the files.

I got there

Now all my code is backed up onto another server using bazaar. The added advantage of using bazaar is that I can work on both my laptop and desktop easily.

[alexandremrj]

My worst mistake was a few years back with a printer and a 56K modem.

I plugged the power source of the printer to the modem and when on it simply fried and let go off some smoke.

With the correct power source it worked and became my most silent modem to date.

[klange]

That virus is getting garbage on the AppDB since it didn't work. I still removed my ~/.wine anyway.

They list viruses on the AppDB? Do you think they're moving towards working viruses - which means a more perfect recreation of windows - or in some way stopping them from working - which could lead to a more incomplete API?

The worst thing I've done is never backed anything up. Let's hope that doesn't turn out to be a major mistake in the future - I keep all of my important stuff divided amongst multiple machines just in case (quite a lot of it is doubled, sort of like a pseudo-RAID, but it's not backing up so much as me being too lazy to remove the copies).

Not so much mistakes as just horrible outcomes: Once attempted to back up a memory card to an XP machine. Something went wrong and both the transfer and the card failed. I lost all the pictures that were on it. I still have the card, and it still works, but the pictures are gone for ever.

Also, wrong AC->DC in some Polk Audio speakers - but they were already dead!

[Acglaphotis]

when i rm'd my /home. : (

[james_bandido]

actually i cant say it was the worst or dumbest thing to do ... but i was so frustrated with the office issued computer since it was running windows ... so i formatted the entire hard drive and installed gutsy ... unfortunately, i forgot to back up my data :lolflag:

[Bölvaður]

When I was starting to use linux I duel booted. I updated my motherboard and was unable to install winxp (I had ubuntu on one harddrive with all my data). I disconnected the linux harddisk and asked a computer guy to install xp on the empty disk that was connected.
When I got it back he had connected the linux disk and installed xp on that one and the xp disk was untouched.
He's my sworn enemy now.

[LightB]

Deleted a home folder with other drive mounted to one of it's sub dirs. Used java on windows, no matter what you have or think you have, that gunk is riddled with malware in the wild and of course the system is vulnerable to it, java on linux isn't.

[bruce89]

On the release of Linux 2.6.17.1, I commented on digg "What was wrong with 2.6.17?".

Bloody silly of me.

[Linuturk]

I've got a few gems to share:

a) this was actually a customer of mine. I got a frantic call that their computer wasn't working. I started with the series of questions you usually as (is it plugged in?, is the power switch on? etc etc) Well, she couldn't figure it out, so I had to rush over there. Turns out, she has plugged in her surge protector into itself. I don't know how she expected that to work.

b) I had a personal laptop that I started using for work, and I decided to join it to their domain. I proceeded to delete/disable all the local accounts because I didn't want them to junk up the Windows XP system. Well, a while later, when I switched jobs, I left the domain. After I rebooted, I realized I didn't have any local accounts to login to!

c) I got a call from someone having problems accessing the email from the mail server we host. I spent about 30 minutes troubleshooting the problem before I asked him open up a web browser and see if he could access the webmail interface. He then informed me that his internet had been down all morning, so that wouldn't work . . .

[Chame_Wizard]

reinstalling windows :lolflag:

[%hMa@?b<C]

I installed a CPU fan as INTAKE instead of EXHAUST. My system quickly reached 60 C and shut itself down. Lucky for me I set it to auto-shutdown at 60, who knows how hot it would have gotten?

[init1]

I rushed through a Caos Linux installation and ended up wiping my hard drive.

[klange]

Released an app with a bunch of fatal bugs, then scrambled to fix them.
Two hours ago.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

Mine was when I agreed to fix my mother in laws PC ](*,)

I did that.

My mother-in-law let my brother-in-law have the Admin password. He used it to go to P0rn sites and the like.

The Nightmare of fixing that computer, removing viruses, etc., every month didn't end until she died.

[ShodanjoDM]

chown -R username:username .
+
chmod -R 777 .

Then after everything settled, I realized that I was still inside the / directory...

...and still with root account as shown in the terminal.

[Stefanie]

i remember i enabled "mouse keys" in the windows 98 configuration panel... i think it happened by accident when i tried to change the mouse speed or something like that (i was only 11 and i didn't speak english yet, so finding the right settings on an english OS was quite difficult :-) ) .

anyway, the numpad didn't work anymore, of course, and so my dad thought the keyboard was broken. So he put it in a box, wrote "keyboard broken" on it and sent it back to the company, hoping that they would fix it. when we got the box back, the "broken" was crossed out and someone'd written "dirty" instead :-)

it took maybe 6 months for me to figure out that i had to disable this mysterious option "mouse keys" :-)

[lisati]

While checking a just-burned DVD of some Tai Chi classes I spotted that the disk shows up in Windows Explorer as "Asperger DVD". Seems I'd forgotten to change the "Disc Label" field on the software to reflect what's actually on the disk.

D'oh! Duh!

[Bruce M.]

I can only refer you to this (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1019203&postcount=45).

Oh my! That's priceless. :)

[Bruce M.]

Mine was when I agreed to fix my mother in laws PC ](*,)

If a picture says a thousand words, you picked the right one for the last 988 words of your story. :)

[JT9161]

Another much more recent case is when playing with partitions I deleted my swap and ended up re-installing GRUB

[Mateo]

when I was young, my harddrive (which at the time was 170mb was getting full. so in order to free up space I did a "del C:\*.*" (i think that was the command anyways). i didn't know at the time that the operating system had files too.

[fissionmailed]

Not using google enough. When I was a noob I didn't think critically enough, but then again, a n00b is a n00b. Thankfully I've gotten over being a complete n00b. Although trying to make my own desktop has been a little tiring. :\

[Bruce M.]

Had to re-install Windows once after a crash, shortly after abandoning my 56k modem for a cable modem. Started with the "4 Emergency Boot Floppies" that then directed their attention to the DVD drive.

Everything went along fine, got windows installed and started to install the firewall and anti-virus software ... when I noticed that the Cable modem lights were going crazy, thinking, What the???? I'm not online with anything.

Reached down and unplugged the modem and completed the firewall install and the anti-virus program, both freeware.

Virus check took forever finding just under 300 infections, SpyBot Search and Destroy found a huge number of mal-ware files ...

It was then that I realized that Windows opens "eth0" on installing. What a DUMB thing to do, but it was my first experience with a cable modem.

After that I always unplugged the modem if I needed to re-install Windows.

Of course now I'm here. :)

[Aearenda]

A couple of years ago, I had just cleaned out a persistent virus infestation on a friend's Windows PC by taking the drive to another (Linux) machine. It took hours. Then I put the drive back in to the original machine, and started up, everything was OK. It downloaded some patches from Windows Update, which wanted to apply on shut down, so I let it, then turned it back on the moment it had shut down. The drive was still spinning, and it blew up the drive electronics. I tell everyone else to leave 30 seconds before turning the power back on, but this time I failed to do that for no apparent reason.
I got a matching drive off ebay, swapped the electronics, but no joy. Nothing worked. Photos etc all gone. We couldn't afford to get it recovered professionally. But about a year later, I came across the same type of drive in my son's computer that had been in my house all along, did the electronics swap trick again, and it worked!

But that's all nothing compared to this booboo. About 25 years ago I accidentally did the equivalent of 'sudo rm -rf database/*' in a script on a running mainframe transaction processing system, for a major retailer, just before Christmas. After we had restored everything, I went back to testing my script and, forgetting that it was the cause of the disaster, ran it again to see what the error message was.... I have no idea how I kept that job!

[OmniCloud]

Go from Windows to Ubuntu without dual-booting, just completely erased my drive!!!

so it worked out in the long-run, but man, those first couple weeks were rough:lolflag:

[Robux the great]

I am guilty of sheer stupidity

A while ago I made the mistake of backing up all of my stuff into an archive on the same drive.

The drive went down.....I lost all my stuff

Stupid Stupid Stupid

Regards

Rob

[Christmas]

I recently had one, not related to Linux, but with my PC, I'm sure it's laughable this one.

I was playing UT2004 and got just a little bit angry, enough to punch my mouse to the keyboard. Next thing I know I couldn't play anymore, since my character was always looking down. That got me so upset I quit the game and tried to navigate a web page. Now it was scrolling down on it all the time, on any page I was. So I say to myself, 'that scroll wheel must have gone nuts' and I open the mouse with a screwdriver. Everything was in place, but the scrolling didn't stop. With the mouse pretty old and I already wanted to buy a new one, so I got the scroll wheel out of the mouse, leaving only just those two pins, without any mechanism for it to work.

All good, no scroll wheel, but at least I can use it now. Suprise! Back into my browser, the scrolling was the same. My eyes fell on my keyboard to see that... the stupid Page Down button was blocked, pressed down! I've gone all to way up to make my mouse unusable without even thinking that it actually has no problems.

I tell you, I'll never buy Logitech keyboards again, ever!

And I (hope) will never hit my mouse again, at least not to the keyboard.

[graabein]

I once did a quick and dirty SQL update on production data and forgot the where clause. Boy, did I feel like a moron! :oops: Thankfully it was in the morning of the day so we just restored the backup from the previous night.

A friend once told me about how his father had cleaned up his computer. He had deleted every document (file) that did not open properly in Microsoft Word! Messed it up good there!

[beercz]

Oh my! That's priceless. :)
Thanks!

[ShanaVar]

I once tried to fix a screw in a switched on computer with a screwdriver. Touched something on the mainboard + graphics card at the same time with the screwdriver -> lot a smoke, nearly every component dead.

Greets

[corrupted_by_sin]

falling asleep on my keyboard. its suprising how many buttons you can press that have adverse effects when just rolling around. deleted all my videos. it was so confusing when i woke up and took some time to figure out what happened and to restore it.

[billgoldberg]

Not on of mine, but one I heard from a friend.

He backed up his entire "nature" videos collection into zip files and burned them to multiple cd's.

One of the cd's got damaged so his entire collection is useless.

I couldn't stop laughing when I heard it.

[Lord Xeb]

This happened about a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to get my blackberry to sync to my laptop and got everything to work except nothing wanted to sync, so I spent the next 1 1/2 trying to get it to work when I relised that I had put an extra character in the PIN X_X

[ColdSpider]

Using Windows...haha.

Seriously, probably this one time I reformatted a really old PC, I had no clue what I was doing and after I got thing running again I realized I didn't have any drivers for the hardware and no internet connection on it so I couldn't download any, and I couldn't put any software on because the only drivers for the CD drive and USB ports were so old they wouldn't read anything. I ended up throwing the piece of junk out and using parts of it for a school project. Ah, I was so naive back then...like a deer in the headlights.

[cool2000m]

I went into my windows file and deleted all of the biggest folders I could find, non-descriminantly. Totally and colpletely destroyed it.

[Nostrafus]

Eh, I think my worst physical one, I was working in a cramped space on my PC, had to tilt it to get to it comfortably, in the middle of doing something, I can't remember what piece of hardware I was installing, I end up knocking over the tower and breaking the hard drive... meh.

Worst software, not my fault, but I ended up having to fix it... many a year ago, when I was living with my parents, in 4 hours while I was gone, my mother or father ended up destroying the computer... I mean, on boot 20+ error messages, monochrome color (didn't even register 16 colors), no cd/disk drive access, shutdown if it tried to boot to windows.

I spent 80 hours straight working on it, I had a bunch of data that had no backups, so I had to recover them. I ended up getting it to work again without a format or anything.

[rizitis]

before 2 years when I press alt+f2 and I command "free the fish"
...the fish is still here :)

[hbah427]

i have a macbook pro, and i was throwing some keys to my bro on the couch.
they keys hit the back of the laptop and cracked the screen
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2054/2766613896_5398150a77.jpg?v=0

[lumix700i]

Just happened about 20-30 minutes ago. I was reading this thread and read about something funny, and I start laughing unaware that my mouth full of water (I drink a lot).. Spills all over my laptop. Thank god it didn't cause any harm.

[Twitch6000]

Trying out windows 3.1 in the year 08 :-#

[Redache]

This thread could be classed as a danger to Laptops then :P.

hmmm...Computer mistakes, I have many many years of breaking things, let's start a list:

When we had a Commodore 64 way back in the day, I must've been 4 or 5 at the time, I was playing Alien Vs Predator or something like it and I got annoyed at some bit where I kept dying so I smacked the Commodore and managed to bend the VGA connector thus destroying all pins that relate to colour and we had a lovely Black and White Commodore thereafter (I've also done it to a Packard Bell screen as well, sadly).

I think I've managed to Nuke a Windows 95 installation by doing some insanely thick things, but my memory of the period between Pentium Pro and Athlon is very hazy.

Ahem, now regarding the Athlon mentioned above. My Brother was putting in a spanking new CD writer into the old Athlon and he wasn't paying attention to what he was doing, which is bad news when you take into consideration that the drive was longer than the older one so he pushed it back as if it were the old one and then closed up and proceeded to turn the PC on. A bang and a Woof later and the motherboard was KIA due to a massive power surge around the Dimm slot. Sadly this isn't the end of it. We had to go a month without a PC whilst we saved enough money to go get us a Gigabyte and a new Athlon from a local retailer which was obviously overpriced (I can't tell you how much I missed the Internets) so me and my other brother went to get our hands on the new stuff, brought it home, pulled the old motherboard from the case and proceeded to fit the new one. Now, you'd think that everything would be ok, it wasn't so. My brother hadn't checked that all the stand-off's were in the right position and one was touching the motherboard, another bang later and we were in tears over out demolished silicon. Luckily we took it back and they swapped it for a new one and sent it back to the OEM as a "duff board". But this time a power supply had met its untimely end also. Thankfully the second motherboard install of the day went without issue and we had a shiny new athlon to play with.

My most recent **** up was with my current Case, an Antec Sonata III. I had a glass bowl sitting on top of it for whatever reason and as I was reaching to grab something behind it when it fell forward and smashed into the front USB ports, which had my Ipod and a thumb drive in at the time. The USB ports are now totaled and I need to buy a new case as replacing the ports on the Antec look to be a nightmare ( I have tried). It's the last time I'll buy an "expensive" case as if I'm going to end up braking it at some point I may as well not waste money on it.

Last but not least, I was walking to the bank in the rain with my Ipod in my raincoat's pocket. You'd think the Ipod would be protected in the waterproof pocket. Sadly Ipod's seem to be made quite poorly and a drop on the screen later the Logic Board went up in smoke and is now an expensive 80 quid brick sitting in a drawer. So I am now a proud owner of a Creative Zen 16GB that was only £100 on Amazon (thank god for Amazon).

I LOVE technology.

[Spike-X]

Sounds like your biggest mistake is letting your brother work on your computer!

[Redache]

He is older and thus more threatening.

I've done my fair share though. It's all in the life of a Computer Geek.

[noobuntu35]

this is one of a few, it's my favorite one.
I erased the system.ini file from a work computer I was removing unwanted Music files to save my job (long meeting unwanted junk on server)... It was a ******* 9.X OS and I came across ZZtop thinking it was the band, and not the recovery Utility that ran each time you booted the DELL Computer, completely hosed the boot.ini
happy ending, the WIN2000 update was a lot easier on the "clean hard drive"
and I kept my job

[BLTicklemonster]

The dumbest computer mistake that I keep making over and over again is expecting an Ubuntu upgrade to NOT mess up my networking and compiz effects (removes my minimize, maximize, close buttons more often than not).

Yep, network was working perfectly for a couple of weeks, now it's back to XP machines can't get to stuff on my machine again, and vice a versa. They see each other, but you have to use a password, which I specifically set this network up not to use.

*twitch twitch twitch*

[y@w]

Definitely going to have to be "rm -Rf *" on my home directory on accident ;)

[Lord Xeb]

LOLOLOL Lets see. My latest computer mistake I just made today. I was working on my Xbox (thats right, I tore apart my old xbox) and I tried to take some tap off I had put on as an air tunnel between the processor's heatsink and the fan. I ended up touching the power supply somehow (I forgot to unplug it) and got one hell of a shock which put me on my ***. Ouch! Then I was trying to reorganize things so as to make things cool a little better and ended up knocking the power supply off the cd drive and it came up saying i needed to take my xbox in for maintenance (as if) and after ten minutes of trouble shooting I noticed what I did and fixed it. Problem solved. My next task is to change the HDD out with a huge one and install linux :D

[noobuntu35]

LOLOLOL Lets see. My latest computer mistake I just made today. I was working on my Xbox (thats right, I tore apart my old xbox) and I tried to take some tap off I had put on as an air tunnel between the processor's heatsink and the fan. I ended up touching the power supply somehow (I forgot to unplug it) and got one hell of a shock which put me on my ***. Ouch! Then I was trying to reorganize things so as to make things cool a little better and ended up knocking the power supply off the cd drive and it came up saying i needed to take my xbox in for maintenance (as if) and after ten minutes of trouble shooting I noticed what I did and fixed it. Problem solved. My next task is to change the HDD out with a huge one and install linux :D

while you're in there upgrade the Sata cables to 150 it will run faster speeds than what Xbox put in it. don't believe it will support 300's I cant find the site with the specs for it

[noobuntu35]

ok so here's another one I did, I installed Ubuntu and the dual boot went bad, (should have added partitions first)Didn't have a current back up of my C drive. I lost my Windows Installation.I Fixed my Windows Install (Last night) with help from Fellow forumers... now Ubuntu is hosed haha. Now I don't know if I want to reinstall Ubuntu or not. Wubi caused me a lot of grief so it's all or nothing. I like Hardy Heron Studio, but can't chance another bad dual boot...

[Daveski]

Wiping a large area of a development server, and then realising I was logged into the live server not the dev server...

[y6FgBn)~v]

This would qualify as my most embarrassing as well. I download music from Amazon quite a bit and after a purchase noticed that the album was not listed in the usual folder after the download. Now this was just after Amazon was having those difficulties with their servers so I assumed this was just another glitch.

After a few emails and phone calls, all of which became progressively more heated, I realized that the name of the album was the actual culprit.

...All This Time

A quick <CTRL> H revealed that it had been there all along :lolflag:

A quick rename and problem solved. I felt so bad though that I sent the poor Amazon rep an email of apology, admitting to my ignorance.

[jpaulb]

deluser --remove-all-files
I forgot I has about 5 Gig of pictures on another hdd:eek:

[jpaulb]

486DX2 when I first got an interest in computers. Took the CPU out just to look at it, and then putting it back in sideways. Turned the computer on and "BZZZZ!!!"... "ahh... I'll never ever forget that smell of burnt metal.

Not guilty on this one!!!

About 1978 I was a service tech for an oil well logging company. A couple of us had a hands on, on one first computerized logging trucks. The computer was the same as the US army was using in their tank's gunnery control system. Can't remember who made the cpu; but it wasn't a 8 bit Intel for sure, mil spec, gold plated, perfect in every respect; except one. If it was installed backwards game over, delivery date approx 4 months.

One of the engineers was impressing us with his knowledge, 3 guess how he reinstalled the cpu.

The boss was very impressed when we explained to him there must be a bug in the software, 'cause the box wouldn't boot anymore.

[Superkoop]

This isn't really bad, but I still felt really dumb...

I wasn't able to get my computer working, and pressing the power button just would do nothing. So, I decided to open up the case, and see why it wasn't powering on. Looking around inside, everything looked fine, so I decided I would start troubleshooting. And I went to unplug it, but it was already unplugged...*blinks*

[bmac]

Buying a PC that had Vista pre-installed..... Couldn't get it off fast enough.....#-o

[david_lynch]

I typed rm -rf * - then realized I was not in the directory where I thought I was...
:lolflag:

[noobuntu35]

programmed in basic on a Commodore 64, installed Windows XP

[ihatetryingtopickaloginna]

Getting off after 12 hours on night shift and deleting most of the os before I realized what I was doing. Some version of dos, don't remember now but probably 3.3

[peruvianfreak250]

i was bored one day and i decided to fix this old laptop i had lying around
i opened it up, fixed the problem and started to close it.
i didnt know it then but i used a screw much longer than it needed to be on a hole located above an ac plug(i didnt see it there) so after a while when i felt a little bit of resistance(because it was hitting the metal thing inside the ac plug) i put my whole body into it and started to force it in lower. then i mad and got a electric drill and was about to use it before i decided to look at the back of the laptop and saw that the screw had gone halfway through the ac connector and i was about to hit the motherboard. i was able to fix it though! i just unbent everything back into place but i was really lucky i didn't break it (was my moms laptop)

[davebell]

I used to wonder what the "double sided" written on floppy disks meant so one day years and years ago( i would hav been about 8) i put a disk in upside down and forced it in. it got stuck, nothing read and i got all except the metal on the end out. a few weeks later my mother went to use it and force another disk in(correct way) and pushed the metal cover in further. I was banned for atleast a month.

[grossaffe]

I once touched an open power supply (by accident). Felt the ripple of AC electricity through my entire body.

[gnuvistawouldbecool]

I once double clicked on a virus in windows. It sort of registered as being fishy at the time, but it was in MSN and the infected person was someone I hadn't spoken to in ages, so I clicked it stupidly.

[BGFG]

Formatted my vista drive to ext3 recently. For some reason forgot to copy over a bunch of family photos. Lost them all. Hurtful thing : remembered to back up my old windows software collection, 'just in case'

First week in Ubuntu; Uninstalled my Hardware Abstraction Layer.

[joshdudeha]

Back in windows 98. I Deleted the on-board graphics driver :)
And couldnt find it again.

Took one of the processors out of my 2 x p3 machine while it was running.
Kinda muffed it up :P x

[Lord Xeb]

LOL. Please explain what happened when you did this. I am interested. >_>

[KiwiNZ]

Purchasing and installing Windows ME :(

[mellowd]

Purchasing and installing Windows ME :(

oh yes.


I've done plently. I've formatted a customers live database before. I've electrocuted myself badly doing something stupid on a live machine as well.


There are simply too many to mention, I wouldn't even know where to start

[Lord Xeb]

>_> I recked my old computer by touching the board inside without grounding myself before e_e

[jesar_gacula]

i typed "chmod 777 -Rf" on "/". amazing, isn't it? ;p

[Mr. Picklesworth]

I saw that post of yours in the support forums, jesar_gacula. I must admit, it led me to a session of face-palming -- Captain Picard style (http://i115.photobucket.com/albums/n287/maxwellz2000/picard-facepalm.jpg)!
Hope it wasn't too painful in the end...

Wouldn't it be cool if Debian had a fixpermissions tool? It's the sort of thing that a good script could, theoretically, repair.

Now that I'm here, I have to say my dumbest thing: Using Zip disks! :(

[Shippou]

Setting my screen resolution in Windows at 1200+x1100+... after rebooting I got the message: "Frequency Over Range."

Another stupid thing: I was afraid of this message, thinking that my monitor will explode. :lol:

Forgetting my bios password.. I have to take out the battery just to reset it, together with some data stored in the cmos...

Typing sudo rm -rf as is. Nothing happens. Went to use sudo rm -f / Then as it was deleting files, I realized that I should have typed sudo -rm rf / in the first place. :)

Have compiz activated in my system. I have no video card, so my system is lagging,..

Dual booting with XP, messing with my settings and grub...

Also, I want my speakers to emit different sounds, i.e. my speaker will emit sounds from totem and my headset from rhythmbox...

But then I hope that someone would make this possible.

[kspncr]

Man, I don't even want to get into some of the stuff I've done. All you need to know is I've been far more frustrated than the average person. I've ripped out vital hardware and thrown it out the window. While the pc was on and performing tasks.

[SeanBlader]

Dumbest mistake I made was making a post with a relevant subject in order to get help on these forums. It looks like what needs to be done to get help is to put "URGENT HELP NEEDED" as your subject instead of something that relates to your actual problem.

Just makes for further frustration when either no one knows what to do with your issue or there is actually no solution to your issue. Actually reminds me of my corporate IT dept.

[joshdudeha]

LOL. Please explain what happened when you did this. I am interested. >_>

Lolll. Well, i deleted the driver when I was about 9 .. 10. When i rebooted... the only mode i could pick was a really horrible resolution with like 16 colours XD!

I then took my processor out when i was 11 and nothing would fix it :S xD

Just bought a new computer once... and when it was booting up.. I took the case off- to see all the fans moving and stuff - and then it started beeping and i soiled my pants cos it was a brand new computer!!!
Was 12 then XD

Now, I know what I'm doing :P

[NoVista]

Nothing makes you take such a deep breath as when all your parts come in for the brand new computer you are building and you inpatiently force the motherboard into the case and immediately short it out.
Then you get to wait even longer for the next one to arrive.

[bashveank]

Worst I've ever done was when I was 7 years old and decided to learn what the delete button did by removing all of my programs on Windows 3.1. More recently, I accidentally sudo chmod -R 777'd the /etc/ directory.

[billgoldberg]

Bought a new computer and wiped the drive.

When trying to boot a live cd to install linux, nothing I burned would start.

Then I tried the Vista cd, didn't work either.

I spend a week on the internet looking for solutions, even called the PB helpdisk.

The only thing the helpdisk said I needed to buy (!) the windows vista cd from them.

I tried a new dvd drive, didn't work.

When I sent it to the shop after two weeks, it turned out it was the dvd drive.

The one that came with the pc didn't work and the spare I tried was also fried.

Needless to say, my mother and brother were pissed at me big time for rendering their new computer unusable for two and a half weeks.

--

It wasn't really my fault, but still, that's the worst thing I had with computer.

That and the fact I once trashed 100gb+ files by accident without having backups.

[SpaceMaster]

A while back, I was installing a fan on the heat sink of a CPU. A moment's distraction caused me to slip, and I knocked something loose. I thought it was just the cooling fins, but it turned out I had knock the CPU free... sans a few precious pins -_-

[Viridia]

Once I formatted the wrong USB drive....

[noobuntu35]

Formatted my vista drive to ext3 recently. For some reason forgot to copy over a bunch of family photos. Lost them all. Hurtful thing : remembered to back up my old windows software collection, 'just in case'

First week in Ubuntu; Uninstalled my Hardware Abstraction Layer.

there is a program to use to fix that http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=891157 my own XPerience check out this thread

[conundrumx]

I was working on filesystem permissions in a Virtual machine and typed sudo chmod 777 /* instead of sudo chmod 777 /etc/dokuwiki/* once.

Thank god for test setups and VM snapshots!

Let this be a lesson to you, if it starts with "sudo" double check what you've typed before hitting enter.

[cobra741]

Accidently syslinux'd my ******* partition :lolflag:

[Woormy]

Unfortunately I have done this too many times to be reasonable but I tend to make changes to a live site thinking it's a staging site, then transfer the changes from staging and overwriting everything I've just done.

[Lord Xeb]

here is another one that I have done:

About 2-3 years ago I had found out about linux and wanted to try it. I know almost nothing about computers then and thought I knew what I was doing. I wanted it to be used so I could look up porn without the expense of my own computer so I decided to try the USB install of linux (I found that using stumbleupon :D) so I tried to install it using my dads corporate computer. the guide I was trying to use was the one for linux not windows XD it said for me to go and put the .ISO into the filesystem so i put it into my programs X_X and I had typed so commands that I didn't understand what they did. I got frustrated and restarted, then fearing something bad, I restarted the computer and it said that the boot was missing O-o. I called customer service for dell, they said it was hosed. So I decided not to tell my dad (his company uses laptops and their docking stations as their main computers. well I hosed my dads computer and finally I got enough courage to say something and when he told the IT guy what was going on, and the IT guy told him what happened he was really freaking pissed. I got grounded for PCs for a month unless someone was next to me watching what I was doing e_e not cool. Oh yeah. It too the IT guy 6 hours for fix his computer. He had to reformat and do a reinstall. I find out later all he had to do was get a live cd, go in and delete the ISO from my programs XD or something like that

[akiratheoni]

I was running a virtualized Linux Mint install and I intended to kill X so I hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and well... it restarted my Linux system and it completely killed VirtualBox so I had to reinstall VirtualBox :(

[adamogardner]

good story lord Zeb. I haven';t had a computer long enough to really get into trouble. but I'll know where to come after I do.

[solitaire]

Worst mistake...

Telling relatives i can fix computers.. (never off the b@#*&$%! phone since!)


Dumbest mistake...

Playing about with zip *.bat script on a Win3.1 machine. Thought I'd try out the password protect option on a test folder (you know zip a file up with a password, and delete the original file). unfortunately i entered a password and ran the script when it was in the 'C:\' instead of 'C:\test' folder....

So i didn't notice that all the windows boot files (You remember config.sys and that lot) were now encrypted ZIP files. Which meant my PC would not boot and i could not figure out why...

It was the first of many... many.... many..... reinstslls of Windows......

[Lord Xeb]

XD I love this topic! MORE MORE!

[Atomic Dog]

I did not do this, but a coworker did.

Our Windows terminal server, which serves all away from office, and telecommuting employees, developed a bad drive. The server had two SCSI drives mirrored and the boss ordered a drive and asked one of us to install it.

So my coworker, eager to please, volunteered. He installed the drive and then copied the blank drive over the good drive. Totally blanked the one and only good drive. He created a backup with some freeware wang-chung freeware backup program and it was corrupt, so the whole server was up in smoke.

Our terminal server was dead for two days while it was being rebuilt from scratch -it was a nightmare. He caught so much hell over it he started to cry (and this was a grown man).

Now for me... I once accidentally knocked out the power cable to our VMware server. I brushed up against it and if fell out. I took down 4 mission critical servers. Wouldn't have been that bad if it weren't for the licensing bug in VMware enterprise which caused all servers using 2 cores to fail to start (they all were). It took hours to get it working again while searching for a solution on vmware forums. We ended up using a trial license to just get them up again. The company lost about $10k in productivity. Freaking nightmare.

[tel93]

Installing XP on a P3 700 w/ 64MB of RAM.

[mellowd]

Now for me... I once accidentally knocked out the power cable to our VMware server. I brushed up against it and if fell out. I took down 4 mission critical servers. Wouldn't have been that bad if it weren't for the licensing bug in VMware enterprise which caused all servers using 2 cores to fail to start (they all were). It took hours to get it working again while searching for a solution on vmware forums. We ended up using a trial license to just get them up again. The company lost about $10k in productivity. Freaking nightmare.

:O Surely a mission critical server would have 2 power supplies in it? :P

[mrsudo]

back when i was using xp and i had to reinstall the os. it asked some rediculously phrased question about keeping my documents. i was left with a blank hdd. :(

[gjoellee]

i used windows...
me to

[billgoldberg]

back when i was using xp and i had to reinstall the os. it asked some rediculously phrased question about keeping my documents. i was left with a blank hdd. :(

I remember those questions in win xp.

These were so badly put that you never new what to answer.

[Tux.Ice]

Go from Windows to Ubuntu without dual-booting, just completely erased my drive!!!

so it worked out in the long-run, but man, those first couple weeks were rough:lolflag:

Thats how i did it. and i never went back, that was back with feisty.

[Atomic Dog]

:O Surely a mission critical server would have 2 power supplies in it? :P

You would think so, but the guy in charge flies by the seat of his pants, Worse, some critical servers are not even backed up! He trusts the array will handle all possible faults.

[andamaru]

I was installing Ubuntu, but my disk was bad. Half way through the install I got an I/O error and the installer stopped. My other Linux was already formatted so I was left with a grub error :lolflag:

[Lord Xeb]

Thats how i did it. and i never went back, that was back with feisty.
That happened to me when I wanted to dual boot and had no idea what to do. I reformated my drive :O and the first week was fun (literally) I was like a little kid in a candy shop with 1000 bucks :D I ******* LOVE LINUX!

[Spike-X]

I remember those questions in win xp.

These were so badly put that you never new what to answer.
"Would you not like to not keep all your existing documents? Do not click no if you would not like to not do this."

[Linuturk]

I once setup a backup of my 60GB home partition to go to /var/backups/ that was on my 20GB root partition. It filled up quickly, I rebooted, and xorg wouldn't start b/c it didn't have room to write the logs. I could have fixed it by booting to a recovery console and deleting the backup, but I didn't know that. I reinstalled.

[Corfy]

This was done at the office on the Windows Servers running MS SQL. We have two SQL database servers, each with their own databases with different tasks, but they also back up the other server hourly, so if we lose a server, we can switch over to the other server and use the database off it with minimal disruption. So we had Database A on Server 1 and Database B on Server 2, but a backup of Database A on Server 2 and a backup of Database B on Server 1.

Well, Server 1 went down due to hardware failure. So we switched over and had Database A and B running off Server 2 until we got Server 1 repaired. Once it was repaired, I copied Database A over from Server 2 and set up the backup routines in place. This was on a Saturday.

First thing Monday morning, when people came in to work on Database A, they discovered that all their data was missing for the last four years. I soon realized that I restored the wrong database, and instead of Database A I had grabbed a temporary test database made from Database A that was made a long time ago (and should have been deleted). However, because the cross-server backup routines were working fine, I overwrote the good Database A on Server 2 with the old database.

And to add insult to injury, because of the cross-server backup thing, we only backed up our SQL databases to tape once a week... which occurred Saturday night after I restored the wrong database, so the only backup we had was a week old. Fortunately, we (well, mainly me, since it was my mistake to begin with) were able to recreate the lost data, but only after a lot of work.

[linuxguymarshall]

I dont know what the worst was but


format c:

was probably my best

[MidsummerDreams]

Between a friend and myself, we finally (after about 8 hours) got Red Hat 5.2 to run on my system, dual-boot LILO jobby with windows still there so I could switch back and forth. The next day I booted up in linux for a while... switched back into Windows and it said I had a Virus on my bootsector (uh oh!) so it asked if I wanted to fix it and without double thinking, I clicked yes.

There went my Red Hat...

There may have been a way to bring it but at that point I just felt it wasn't meant to be.

[The Doell]

When I just started using a Linux platform I deleted my video driver. :-x At the time didn't know much command line, but it was a great learning experience!

[LossLess]

Remember DOS 6.2's DoubleSpace? I was amazed, it took my hard drive from 102MB to like 320MB of free space, supposedly. What was even more, after it had run, I had this stupid 50MB file that I had no idea what it was, so I deleted it, I was ready for like, 400MB of available space!!! Ummm... that file was the compressed contents of my entire hard drive. This is actually worse than format c:, I think, as I knew enough to get that far, and yet it didn't dawn on me where all my data had gone??? Yeah.

[jmate24]

deleting over 110GB of video, including the entire fourth season of Star Trek: Voyager and the 3,4,5th seasons of Andromeda and all of my Tax and School Documents that i was saving from last semester.

And for not making Ubuntu my primary OS.

Now it is!

[pastormick]

The first time I ran into a virus that copied a friend's Windows address book, I opened an email from her that I thought was harmless. It wiped out two years worth of sem papers, all of my research bookmarks and other stuff that made life (school) a lot simpler. And, you guessed it, I didn't even know what a backup was.

Needless to say, I installed Linux (Redhat at the time; just before Fedora) and have been there ever since.

Mick

Oh; and I DID learn how to do a backup...

[Eisenwinter]

My dumbest mistake was deleting my home folder, when I was using Debian.

I knew that as a regular (non-root) user, doing rm -rf /, will not delete my system.

Stupidly, I forgot that even as a regular user, I do have power to read and write to my home folder, so I did rm -rf /, and deleted /home :lolflag:

[dnns123]

I dropped an 80GB HDD full of pr0n. Saddest day of my life...:(:(:(

[pp.]

I had but one disk drive which was nearly full when I decided to re-install my PC. However, I had this unused tape backup drive. It was unused because there were no drivers for the OS of my machine, or not even for its architecture.

Small problem. This is what I did:
- Wrote the driver
- debugged and tested the driver rigorously
- dumped the content of my disk to the wonderful tape backup drive
- dumped an archive with the source and the compiled driver to the tape backup as well
- re-formatted the disk drive
- installed the OS on the disk drive.

[floreal]

I tried to connect to my Ubuntu installed machine's share from Debian installed computer by Samba. I cant managed to do it after 3 hours. Then a brilliant idea occured in my brain. Firestarter was enabled on Ubuntu. After disabling that everything was OK.
Why firestarter, why?
I dont need you already.

[Corfy]

This isn't my mistake, but I was sitting beside him when it happened.

A friend at college, who was running Win 3.1 at the time (the latest version at that point) was looking for a blank floppy disk. He pulled out a floppy, popped it in the drive, pulled up the command line and ran the following command:

dir a:

It showed a couple of files, but nothing that he wanted to keep. So he typed in the following command:

format

He completely forgot that he never actually switched to the A drive, so the format proceeded to wipe his C:. He had to reinstall DOS and Win3.1 from floppies.

[hermes0710]

I was connected remotely to my home pc and it crashed and i couldn't restart it. So I hard-shutdown the local one :)

[Lord Xeb]

LOL. >_> I deleted my flash drive once and it had all of my school stuff on it ;_;

[Keith Hedger]

while playing about with truecrypt i accidentally encrypted an external 500G drive instead of the 8M pen drive i was experimenting with and didnt bother to use a memorable password couldn't get my data back off of the drive (about 300G) and no backup:(

[hbah427]

@zeb
whoa
how did you *delete* your flash drive!?

the 1st law of thermodynamics states: energy cannot be created or destroyed; rather, the amount of energy lost in a steady state process cannot be greater than the amount of energy gained.

so how did you *delete8 your flash drive out of existence?!?!?

[jimi_hendrix]

More recently, I accidentally sudo chmod -R 777'd the /etc/ directory.
what does that do

[fballem]

I got my first computer in 1984. It was an IBM PC with two floppy drives, 256K RAM, and monachrome monitor. I was working on finishing a manuscript and it really was going very well.

I thought that I was making a backup from one floppy to another, but unfortunately, I overwrote the floppy that contained my manuscript. Two months' work off into the ether, and a two-week deadline to get it all done (no hard copies of course).

Needless to say, I have been a maniac about backups ever since, which came in handy when spilled orange juice fried my laptop two days before I was going to start working on a contract in New York.

Every one learns to backup the hard way!

[Xanatos Craven]

I repartitioned my hard drive in such a way that I'd be able to install a different operating system without losing any of my files, moved said files where they now belonged....... and ended up losing everything anyway. I forget what exactly I did to cause this (which may be a good thing), but in my "defense", or rather the true mistake, it was very late at night and I couldn't focus very well.

[Bölvaður]

what does that do

gives everyone (user/group/others) all rights (read/write/execute).

[luckyuser]

i deleted the boot files when trying to do something funny with dualboot. wasn't thinking, took a bad risk, got unlucky.

[Lord Xeb]

Nice job >_> Also, I shreded my flash drive. I ment /dev/sdb not /dev/sdc e_e

Now i have 3 redunent backups of all my important stuff >_>

[patrickballeux]

I wanted to do a clean install of Ubuntu...

Hardisk was 2 partitions: one for "/" and one for "/home"

Upon installation, I decided to format the "/" partition having in mind to not touche the "/home" partition because all of our data and pictures are in that folder...

I double and triple check to be sure to choose the right partition: "The biffer is home, the bigger is home, the bigger is home..." Then click "Enter" to start formatting... the bigger partition...

Actually, I kind of reacted in slow motion on this. It took a few minutes to visualize what I had done while Ubuntu was installing on the harddrive...

Yep! I had formatted the "/home" partition instead of the "/" partition... So I said to myself, I have a recent backup just in case... Wrong!

The last backup was over a year ago... And we lost all 2007 photos that we took because I forgot to do the backup on them. The worst is that I had to explain that to my wife. Tricky part I should say...

Eventually, we were able to retrieve some of the photo because we had send some to family and our friend, but that was 10% of it...

That was the worst and dumbest think I've done...

[knattlhuber]

I already posted this in a thread entitled 'Ubuntu Idiot Extraordinaire' but it fits in here perfectly:

I got a new computer recently and couldn't wait to install Ubuntu. I unplugged my keyboard, mouse and monitor from my old computer, connected them to the new one and started the installation. When I came to the screen with the partition manager, I was pleasantly surprised: The computer was supposed to have one 750 GB HD but instead there were three HDs with a total capacity of >1 TB. Coool! Without thinking twice, I created the partitions, formatted all three drives, kicked off the installation, and stepped out. Then suddenly something terrible dawned on me. I stormed back to my room and found my suspicion confirmed: The USB cable that I had thought belonged to the mouse, was actually the one from the USB hub on my old computer - which had two USB HDs connected... I had just wiped off 300GB worth of data in a heartbeat.:(

(Fortunately, the data on the two drives was mainly backups. Using TestDisk (it's in the repos), I was able to recover both partitions.)

[django0909]

I spilled a bottle of beer into a laptop I didn't own at the time. Not a very technical mistake, a costly one though :S

[tdrusk]

ran a dd command and formatted the hard drive I was using.

[ChanServ]

was c/p a command into the terminal, and acidently c/p sudo rm -rf/ :P
*note: do not do*

[RedPandaFox]

I uninstall Evolution in Gnome, lost all my pannells, icons, pretty much all Gnome things. How I did it, I have no clue!

[malachi1990]

When I updated to hardy, I noticed some speed issues, and I decided to go back to gutsy. I was silly enough not to use the guided partitioning on the live cd, and accidentally formatted my drive. Yep, haven't touched proprietary formatting software since.

[Lord Xeb]

nice
I have lost all the data on my external drive before
good thing I had a backup :D but still

[Sycron]

deleted message

[fitzman49]

Deleted all my friends porn. He was not very happy.

[Sycron]

Deleted all my friends porn. He was not very happy.

:lolflag: indeed

[kjb34]

Last year I moved my computer to another area of the room and when I plugged evrything up I put the mouse and keyboard into the wrong plugs. So I boot up the computer keyboard and mouse don't work. Long story short I ended borrowing my keyboard and mouse still couldn't get it to work and going to reinstall Ubuntu when I took a good look at the back of the computer and realized I had the mouse and keyboard in the wrong place.:oops:

[Tindytim]

Installed Mac OSX.

[ronnielsen1]

deleted message
_________________
Must have been a real bad one

[ronnielsen1]

Not making sure I seated the memory good and turned my computer into a welder

[knattlhuber]

Quote:
deleted message
_________________



Must have been a real bad one

The original message before deletion was:


http://start.ubuntu.com/8.04/

(No kidding)

[Sycron]

The original message before deletion was:



(No kidding)

Yes it was, but I missed the threads. It was a pool "What is you home apge setted to?"

[knattlhuber]

Yes it was, but I missed the threads. It was a pool "What is you home apge setted to?"

Ah, I see. Sorry mate :)

[dubhear]

there are so many dumb things i've done. here is one i did recently.

so i bought tis new power-unit-thing for my central unit (old was making crazy noises). i changed it ok. put the wires all right. checked if it does run or not. it said "no bootable partion in table."

then i tried to figure out what it was up to. i checked bios and all.

finally i checked my wiring second time and noticed that there was no power to hd.

D'OH!!

[Lord DarkPat]

delete

[Sycron]

Worked hard 14hours/day for 4 days at a website and trying to install Pupee linux on a partition. Instead of sdb, i've done sda... Everything was wiped... :(

[Sycron]

I've done a big mistake.
cd / && chmod -rf 777 * The only thing that i could done was to reinstall everything.

[mike1234]

I uninstall Evolution in Gnome, lost all my pannells, icons, pretty much all Gnome things. How I did it, I have no clue!


You uninstalled "evolution-data-server-common" It's an architecture file which means other apps need it to run or be present on Ubuntu.

M.

[Tinkerman]

In a big hurry one day reinstalling *******, and I formatted a USB drive that I was using as backup! I left it plugged in and assumed I was formatting the proper drive. 150 GB of years of data, gone... or so I thought.

After a slight bit of panic, I found some software that helped me get it all back, but it sure would have sucked had it not!!

Dumbest mistake with hardware was with a brand new BIOS chip that I had waited for two weeks to get. I all too quickly installed it.... backwards!! It smelled real nice as it fried instantly.

There are others, but these were the stupidest.:lolflag:

[kaspar_silas]

This happened about 2 yrs ago after a long haul flight to Tokyo. In fairness I was half asleep but I guess it still counts as dumb.

I was reading my laptop whilst walking along. Thinking about it now I don't know why I was doing this, I must have looked a prat.

Anyway I stepped on to an escalator. Going up I tried to put my laptop back in my backpack without taking the backpack off. Naturally it fell behind me onto the metal step and continued to bounce down much to the shock of onlookers and me.

I would say it fell probably 20ft in total with maybe 4 bounces. Not surprising I was rewarded with a blue screen. Amazingly the next day when I went to look at it it was fine. God bless Toshiba Satellites.

Annoyingly some bugger stole it a few months later.

[Bliepo32]

My dumbest mistake? Update to XP service pack 2 on the computer of my uncle. Suddenly it crashed, and didn't boot anymore.

Later, I discovered that service pack 2 had higher hardware requirements. Too high actually.

[lukjad]

Backed up my system to an external drive. Deleted all the other backups. Wiped the computer. Accidentally wiped external hard drive will all of my programs, text files, pics, etc. I never got them back. Five years of text files, gone.

[Sycron]

That's the problem with VERY important content on r/w environment...

[god0fgod]

I once ran a recovery program and it found some file... unfortunately they were old versions, very old. Things I was working on for a long time were permanently overwritten by this stupid program.

Oh. It was Norton. I hated it almsot as much as the OS it was run on.

But I have ubuntu working now!

That reminds me. I accidentally deleted ubuntu once. I needed to anyway, thank goodness. But it coulds have been a problem.