Worst PC disaster ever?

[fela]

The guy who came to clean up could have used a non-MS utility to copy the files to floppies, which would have preserved the file names.

Stupidity was involved in this case on so, so many levels...

Should have used dd (straight byte-for-byte copy)

[beercz]

Excellent. Please keep well away from my computers though

Will do, provided you don't spill water, coffee, beer, coke etc. on them. Computers tend not to like liquids

[Rasa1111]

Will do, provided you don't spill water, coffee, beer, coke etc. on them. Computers tend not to like liquids

Except for Thinkpads!
You can spill a full mug of hot tea and sugar into them and they still kick! (see previous post). lol

[beercz]

Except for Thinkpads!
You can spill a full mug of hot tea and sugar into them and they still kick! (see previous post). lol

OK, OK!!!

Most computers (at the moment at least) tend not to like liquids.

Move on!!!

[Rasa1111]

was more of a joke than anything, really.
but OK, "moving on!!!" lol

[Paqman]

Well here are some equations:

power [watts] = voltage [volts] * current [amps]

This is why a small voltage but high current, as well as a high voltage but small current, can both kill you. Or why 500,000 volts at a 0.000004 amps will not kill you, or why 100 amps at 0.03V will not kill you.

I think there's a bit of confusion going down here guys.

In your example above, for 100A to flow at only 0.03V you'd have to have a resistance of 0.3mΩ. The human body's resistance would be measured in kΩ, so about a million times more than your example. A shock big enough to push 100A through you would have to be exceedingly high voltage.

Bottom line: it's the current that determines how dangerous a shock is. 100 amps will BBQ you every time. That's serious current, and you will not survive. The current is a function of the voltage and your resistance. If you consider your resistance to be (roughly) a constant then it basically comes down to:

more voltage = more current = more death

Of course, there's a lot more to it than that. The path the current takes matters, AC is more lethal than DC, and the resistance of a human isn't a constant, but you get the idea.

[fela]

Paqman, cheers, that post cleared things up a bit

[nerdy_kid]

I once formatted my 2TB backup drive as I was trying to use the usb disk creator to install Ubuntu on one of it's three partitions. I almost lost 500GBs of data (some of it on an encrypted drive at that) but testdisk and a little manual partition table tweaking saved my life

[Kraus]

I've had a few disasters over the years.

My dad had bought a brand new Toshiba laptop with a Pentium 4 CPU and 1GB of RAM, he lets my little brother and me play Runescape on it with my little brother having a nice large bottle of soda right next to the laptop. I left the room to get a drink or something and what I find when I return is my little brother with a "OMG" face on and the laptop keyboard covered in soda, I flipped out and called for my dad whom was "wtf did you just do!?!?". Needless to say my little brother was punished and my dad never let him near that laptop for sometime...

Another disaster would be when my dad took me to work with him (this was two years ago), he owns and operates a computer tech company here in Da Burgh and I was in "training" to start a job soon. He let me into a large but cramped room with large server carts and towers lining the walls, all of which were on wheels. We proceed to the terminal and start getting to work on the servers, when my dad got up to get something he knocked over a server rack which made everyone go "OMG. WHAT IS HAPPENING!?" in the office. Turned out that was a important server which maintained the entire network, we spent another three days setting all that back up...thats what I call "training".