Funny Computer Mishaps

[Kat]

....well, at least they are funny now.
What are some of the things you did that were dumb to mess up your computer?

What i did was i took the new hdd i got, put Windows on it and hooked up my old Windows drive as a slave with Windows and programs still installed on it. I got lazy and decided it would be a good idea to see if the programs worked on the Slave and use those instead of installing them again on C:\. One of those programs was Window Washer and it worked. The first time i ran it, it came across some odd numerical files i didn't recognize. It asked me if i wanted to skip them and i said yes. The second time,i decided what the Hell, i'll get rid of them. Well, i finish the wash and like two seconds later my computer screen goes black. Turns out i deleted the files that the hdd uses to identify itself to Windows(or something like that). It took me two hours with the Western Digital floppy to get it all back.

My brother spilled Coke on my Dad's keyboard and all the keys died except for a few alphabetic ones. My brother opens up Notepad and whatever working key he would press it would spell out FAGFAGFAG. Now, we refer to it as the FAG keyboard.

[beltorak0]

hmm... once i edited COMMAND.COM to have the screen clear to grey-on-blue instead of black-on-blue.  My dad had to re-buy Dos 3.31 twice for editing command.com.  stupid non-write-protected originals.

more recently, I invoked the awesome power of root in kde to change all the files in /usr to owner :user and mode 640.  yup. even directories.  after everything quite working because none of the /usr libs could be found, i realised my mistake, and tried to hand-change them back.  after two hours, i decided to re-install slack 8 over the existing install.  that fixed it fairly well. don't cain me yet; i was only using linux for 2 weeks at that point.

about two months later, i [ctrl]-[c]'d out of slack's install script with the windows partition still mounted.... and had to fix a "mount table corrupt" error by digging thru the code to see what it was cdhecking.... fixed that.  Then the next day, i came home from work to find a note taped to my computer: FIX WINDOWS!!!!!!!!.  it wouldn't boot.  two hours of searching the net reveiled the following a precedure that entailed moving the old msdos.sys; runing sys on drive c:, deleting the newly created msdos.sys, and moving the old one back into it's place.  how messed up is that?

-t.

[SpeeDFreaK]

Well, there was a time whem my comp dual booted between Mandrake 8.0 for windows and Win2K (or was is 98?). Had it installed, everything running fine. Looking through mandrake installation in Windows. (ran it on a fat32 part, bulk of installation was in a 2-3gb file). Eventually it crapped out on me and i was left with just windows. Looking around at my trashed linux install, i found a folder marked grub. I figured "Hey linux doesn't work anymore, so shift-right click, delete!" Next time i turn on my computer i'm greeted with "start 1". Restarted about 5 times, same message, then I realized i just f'd my bootloader...reinstalled windows for the nth time.

[choasforages]

hmmmm, i installed redhat 7.0 and didn't know how to start the gui with the command startx. i had to reinstall redhat 7.0 again, so i could use the computer. hmmmmmmm, i installed FreeBSD on the wrong harddrive, obliterating my unreal and unreal tournament installs. installed from source gnome2, just to have sawfish decide not to compile/*well, metacity does look nice though*/ used a yahoo keyboard. get water on my microsoft intelie mouse, buy a lexmark printer with binary only linux drivers, buy a thinkpad 600, only to find out that the soundchip will probabluy never work under linux. put $100 into a powerbook 1400, just to have it not connectto my network/*im working ont he one though*/

[rtgwbmsr]

quote:Originally posted by beltorak0:
FIX WINDOWS!!!!!!!!

Why bother? It's broken beyond repair!
     

Everytime I come across a Wintel PC with Windows problems I buy an old Mac or install Mandrake/RedHat/Slackware/Debian (depending on who it's for)

XP is the worst though. When it breaks, it automatically restarts, so you can't see the error code on the BSOD (note: turning off the "Restart on Error" option does shit) I couldn't count how many people called me to fix this problem. Only option: Reinstall Windows (Or preferably talk them into using Linux or buying a Mac - I've converted so many fed up people this way)

-Dustin

[ August 16, 2002: Message edited by: The_Muffin_Man/ Dustin /B0b ]

[voidmain]

Had an RS/6000 wiped out because of a stupid admin. He wanted to remove all of the files and subdirectories under a particular subdirectory, including the hidden files (files that start with ".") so he did an "rm -rf .* *" as root.  Well, after 5 minutes or so the command had not yet completed and he thought that was odd because there wasn't much under the subdirectory.  Needless to say ".*" also matches ".." which is the parent directory so it started to recurse down the directory tree to the root directory and then proceeded to erase everything on the system that it could.  This system served about 300 programmers.

Needless to say the first thing I did was fire him, and the second thing was to get out the backup tapes and restore the system.  Those were the days when you really had to know what you were doing to be an administrator. I believe most versions of "rm" have built in protections to not allow this to happen today.  I still am in the habbit of using ".??*" when I want to delete hidden files/directories with wildcards just in case.

[choasforages]

hmmmm, i once deleted libc6.so or something like that, becuae i had just recompiled glibc and didtn' know what i was doing atthe time. i deleted it to replace it with the one i just compiled, doh, that was pretty dumb

[Chooco]

i tried to see if i could abuse a PHP application that i made on my website which was on a Windows computer.
the PHP application allowed me to make a file then save the file as whatever name i wanted. i made a file which was blank and saved it as ../../../mysql/bin/mysql.exe

suddenly MySQL stopped working and i had to re-install it on the web server lol

[Calum]

my keyboard doesn't do capital 'x's unless you use the caps lock, and doesn't do capital 'd's or 'r's unless you use right hand shift key. Also, escape either doesn't work, or sticks on, and ~ is hard to type too. Not sure if it was something that i did though, but it was fine when i bought it. Of course now i'm stuck with it, since it's a laptop...

[Master of Reality]

blood + motherboard = bad
do you really want to know more?
---------------------
i turned my computers off in a thunderstorm after the storm had long gone away i turned on my computers and just when they had started up the power blinked out and corrupted something that i could fix causing me to re-install debian, then redhat Linux and having to find iptables equivalents to my ipchains that i had. The Bob Hub is still up though!

[ August 17, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

[beltorak0]

dustin:
 

quote:
Why bother? [windows is] broken beyond repair!

yeah, tell that to my wife tho.  she absolutly refuses to use linux.  "It looks different" she says.  anytime i bring it up, she simply says: "you're obsessed", and then promptly ignores me until i'm done ranting about M$.

*sigh*.  what are we to do?

-t.

[choasforages]

well calum, you could always tell us what model of laptop it is, or run it through ebay, it shouldn't be too hard to replace the keyboard out of it. just maybe it will cost like $40 or so off of ebay

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by beltorak0:
*sigh*.  what are we to do?

Upgrade from Wife for Windows version 1.0 to Wife for Xwindows version 2.0.

[ August 17, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[choasforages]

meet girl that is somewhat interested in computers, and who plays more video games then i do.

[ August 18, 2002: Message edited by: choasforages ]

[Chooco]

man i don't know if i could be in a relationship where the girl totaly hates computers.....what do you say when she says "my damn computer crapped again", do you reply "well how did you f*** with it this time?"
?