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What Was Your Worst Computer Accident?
Anonymous Writer writes "I learned years ago to backup regularly and never keep a drink on the same table as a laptop. I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards, ruining the motherboard, CD-ROM, and hard drive. Thousands of dollars and all my data disappeared in a flash. Considering that there are even people out there that intentionally damage hardware, I was wondering what kind of disasters Slashdot readers have experienced."
I'd have to say one of the worst computer accidents I had was ruining my Slashdot ID by attempting a first post.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
mkswap /dev/hda1 /dev/hda3
instead of swapon
hda1 = data
mda3 = swap
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
December 23, 1998 - Before leaving work I tried connect to my home web server to transfer some files. The connection timed out. That seemed odd. I was just on a couple of hours ago.
Got home. The screen's frozen on the computer. Ctl-alt-Del...Nothing. Reboot... the monitor doesn't even come on! Ok, take the cover off, get out the canned air, blow dust off the components, see if anything is loose.
Holy shit! I see a mouse wandering around inside the computer!
I think about getting something to kill it, but don't want to mess up the hardware, so I shake it out. It drops out and neither the cat or dog see it as it scurries under the couch.
After about 30 minutes of sleuthing I find that the Ethernet card is blown. It's got a nice little burn mark on one of the chips where the mouse apparently PEED on it!
Well a quick trip down to Compu USA and everything is back in order. The cat's still sleeping on the couch -- but it's only a matter of time before one of us frag's that mouse!
Lesson: Don't leave any of your slot covers off the back of your computer.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
$100 to replace the *melted* keyboard. note to self: never remove nail polish near a computer.
I did a
on my friend's machine, in order to change permission on all of the hidden directories and files. I didn't think that ".." and all of its subdirectories would also be traversed, which coupled with the "-R" changed ownership on every file on her computer.I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
Hitting reset in the middle of a re-org is a bad idea. Department lost everything, except that it didn't really lose everything. Everything was still in files, but the files were scrambled. They printed out the contents of each file, figured out what file each fragment belonged to, and typed it all back in.
Fortunately, this hard disk was only a megabyte or so.
Once, during the 70s, I accidentally spilled Pepsi on the control panel at the Two Mile Island nuclear power plant, and Jimmy Carter came to fix it, and he was irradiated and grew to over 50 feet...
Boy that was embarassing.
In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Security, and make sure there is a check mark next to "Block power supply cookies". I don't know why MS didn't turn that on by default.
The worst 'accident' I had was letting people know I had a kick ass computer. There is absolutely no data recovery when you computer is stolen and it's not physically there anymore.
--- to swing on the spiral...
Purchasing Windows 98.
After more than 15 years in Unix-land, why did I make *that* move? What was I thinking? I'm so glad that it was about that time that Linux made Unix accessible "for the rest of us".
In highschool I did a project on animal behaviour for a biology class, which entailed imprinting a duckling on myself, and carrying it around everywhere for the duration of the project, and observing. I was working on my computer, with the duckling on the desk in front of me, and it started doing its 'I'm gonna dump walk'...stepping backwards, wings outstreched and ass up. Next thing I knew, the keyboard was hit around the F keys with a wet one, and it gave out almost instantly. I wonder if anyone else has lost hardware to a duck?
Debian, especially back then, was not a good newby distro. After installing it, I was left at a blank terminal thinking, "Okay, now what."
In my frustration trying to set up X, I decided "to hell with it, I'll install Slackware," and I hastily did a "rm -rf /"
As I listened to my noisy hard drive chug a long, I remembered that I had mounted my Windows partition.
"But surely Linux will know I only wanted to rm the Linux part."
Yeah, I was wrong.
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
The next morning, I wake up, somewhat hung over, and decide that this directoy was a /stupid/ idea. So, I execute the obvious command:
I then wander off in search of some tylenol, and come back with two term papers irretrievably lost.The obvious moral of this story is, "don't root under the influence." (From my more mature perspective, I would like to suggest that drinking less might also be a good plan.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Worst accident has to be accidentally dropping a (still running) webserver powered off a UPS (which I was also carrying). The hardware damage and data loss caused wasn't worth the uptime I was trying to keep :-/
-K
10. breaking off the contact part of a PCI card while trying to extract it. The PCI slot is still unusable to this day. Not that I use that old computer anymore though. /" trick /Y to a Windows NT Logon script. Ah, the good old senior pranks.
9. Sitting on a brand new Pentium 4 accidentally, bending all the pins
8. Not getting a UPS/surge strip/voltage regulator. Over time, the voltage irregularities caused my power supply to literally catch on fire.
7. Installing Windows.
6. Falling for the "hey, try rm -rf
5. Dropping a monitor down the stairs
4. Taking over an NT domain accidentally by running samba as a PDC
3. Leaving a P4 laptop running inside a closed, insulated laptop case. Literally everything overheated.
2. "Accidentally" adding DELTREE C:\
1. Posting this list on Slashdot.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Back in 1983 or 1984 when I was in my last year of high school, we used to carry around our 5 1/4" floppies in plastic boxes. Those of us that were quite proficient on the Apple II were assigned as teachers' assistants and had our assignments plus pirated games on these disks.
The problem was, while we were helping other students, some people would steal disks because they were expensive and we had all the coolest games.
One day after my entire box disappearing, I sat in the lab pissed. I wrote an INIT program for the Apple DOS that would ask for a password, two wrong guesses and it would trash the disk and erase itself from RAM. My first attempt was pretty much done, but I had no disks because they were recently stolen. So I saved it on the classroom disk everyone stores their work on. I named it "DO NOT RUN THIS PROGRAM" and left for the day.
The following day, I arrived and the instructor grabbed be by the shirt and shoved me up against the wall and shouted:
"Did you save a program the the class disk called 'do not run this program'? Because some little asshole decided to run it and we lost all the assignments and all of my grades for the semester!"
I did what anyone would do in that situation. I lied my ass off.
Another example:
Flash forward 12 years or so. In the lab at my company. We are trying out control software for relay control on an electrical switches about the size of filing cabinets. There are about 128 relays in each, and the suckers were hooked up on 120VAC. This was our only time to run test software before they got shipped out to the customer the next day.
Started up the software and all seemed ok. An odd smell started and I noticed the room's ambient light was changing... sorta orangish. I turned around and they were glowing hot and smoke was billowing out. I killed power, but it was way too late. 2-3" holes were burned in the PC boards. Later I found out the tech who hooked up the power didn't know what to hook the relays up to, so he wired them straight to ground. That didn't stop me from crapping bricks for the next few hours as the entire company showed up at the lab doors to see what the horrible smell was coming from.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I was going to moderate this but I couldn't find "-1, self-righteous" in the list.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
A friend of mine did something similar in VB.
He was in his VB class making a program and at the end it would print it's contents. He decided it would be cool to have it ask how many copies you wanted. So he coded it.
It turns out he forgot to define the variable he used, so instead of printing 1 copy, it got stuck in a loop of printing.
As mentioned above this was during a class, which had a laser printer that printed at least 5 sheets a second.
Well, SIMM memory math is strange.
I had 2 4M SIMMs (same), 2 8M SIMMs (different) and 1 16M SIMM. I was placing them in random order in a PC, trying to achieve maximum RAM capacity. Conclusions? 4M+4M=1M, 8M+4M+4M=12M, 8M+8M=8M, 8M+16M=20M, 16M+4M+4M=a violent burst of flame from the motherboard.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
When a co-worker spilled my large cup of coffee into my own Panasonic CF-35 Toughbook laptop, he actually said, "think of it as installing Java." I was not amused. The laptop survived! Of course, I spent much of the following weekend washing each removable piece of the keyboard.
when i got my first computer, (a dell pentium p60) I accidently installed a demo version of OS2 warp cause it came with a magazine and i thought it was a game, completely wiped out my dos/win 3.11 setup.
I'm sure at least a few of the posts on here are going to be about making a typo while running "rm". It is with that in mind that I offer this piece of timeless advice: with rm, always type your flags last. Period. There are plenty of good examples of why this is a good idea, but I think this one shows it the best:
/somedir/file/" you bump enter while you hit slash (they're right next to each other, remember) resulting in "rm -rf /"
/somedir/file/ -rf") and you make the same mistake, you only end up typing "rm /" which does nothing, instead of a command that will fuck up your entire system.
While typing "rm -rf
If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm
We had a rack in our network room that had recently been moved so that new cable could be run behind it. No one had informed me that when it was put back into position it hadn't been attached to the floor, wall, ceiling, nothing, and the entire rack was BARELY balanced and standing.
One of the servers on the rack had a CD drive that was somewhat broken, it didn't open when you pushed the button. So, doing what I always did, I sat at the workstation a few feet away and logged in remotely. I gave the command for to eject the CD, and as it did, I watched a very full server rack teeter forward from the weight of the CD tray, and then crash to the floor.
I was very lucky my boss had taken his Zoloft that day.
That was a *mistake*? ;-)
I was 11 at the time, and when my dad found out he wasn't very happy...
Being a lazy bastard I usually jsut leave my case open for cooling and so I can swap out cards and drives without having to remove a side panel. I came home from college a few years ago and stuffed in some new drive I got for xmas and left the case open. I thought nothing of doing what I've always done but sadly I had forgotten one minor detail. A six foot, scaily detail. My iguana is about 15 years old and pretty much senile and does whatever he wants without reason or cause. Somtimes he wonders about the house and gets lost in closets. He also can climb anything known to man so the fact that it was on a desk didn't even come into it. I neglected to concider all this when I left it open. Sure enough I came home one day to find the computer utterly obliterated on the floor with the cards strewn around and mobo and cpu shattered. I have no idea how he didn't get electructed but I even found one of his claws stuck in the cpu heatsink fins. The only thing I can figure is that he thoguht a handy souce of hot air was fucking badass so he wanted to cuddle up close to it and probally got shocked by one of the cards. It sucked but live and learn.
I always got a kick out of Dell's advertising about dropping stuff a few feet to test durability, etc
We got a brand new Dell 1750 Dual Xeon 1U server which was going to be our Novell R/W Replica & Login box. I put the versa rails in the rack, about 5ft off the ground. Now anybody who works with Dell's knows the new servers have these nubs on the sides which sit into slots on the extended rails - in other words instead of sliding the server INTO the rails like most servers, you have the rails already extended and set the server down ONTO the rails, into those slots. Then you slide everything into place.
Well, it was late - everybody was gone. But it was a 1U box - not TOO heavy (but heavy enough) So I hoisted it up and gently set the nubs into the slots - or so I thought. The right rear nub was not seated and it slipped out. The unit pivoted and our brand new 1750 went crashing into the floor below corner first!!!!! I can still picture it in slow motion as it hit the ground corner first, banged off the rack, and then slammed onto the floor.
Man talk about getting a sinking feeling in your stomach. The right rear corner was totally crumpled. In a panick I opened the case expecting to see a motherboard is a shattered corner.
Nope - the motherboard was fine. The power supplies had come out of their connectors - and slid right back in. The drives had come unseated due to the shock and had to be reseated. A couple hours later with pliers, ballpeen hammer, and other assorted tools, I managed to get the case corner bent back into what was close to normal. All the internals looked ok.
I booted up the system - nada. The 'Processor mismatch' LED was lit on the board. Ugh. Figured I'd cracked a CPU or worse. Then I noticed one of the heatsinks was ever so slightly higher than the other. I unhooked the retainers and found one of the processors had come OUT of the ZIF socket and was being held on top of the socket by the retaining clip. I could only imagine what the CPU had done to itself with its pins making intermittent contact with the socket below while power was on.
Well, after gently getting the CPU off the heatsink without cracking it (it was stuck to it by the heat paste), I reinserted the CPU, applied new paste, and reinstalled the heatsink.
Damn thing booted right up and has run without issue ever since - going on 6 months now. All diags, hard drives included, passed with flying colors.
Talk about dodging a bullet! Built Dell Tough!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
You know, while reading the stories here, I realize that I have been quite fortunate over the-
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Oops. oooh. Oh yeah. . . That.
Whew. I'd actually blocked that one from memory. .
Okay. .
So way back when a 486 was something special, I was young and didn't have a cool computer of my own. Upstairs where the adults lived, (I slept in the basement, would you believe?), my father had just such a gleaming-cool 486 with many bells and whistles, the most significant being a sweeeeet laser printer he'd just wrangled out of his job.
We're talking a top-of-the-line Hewlet Packard beast. This was back in the day when HP made good printers rather than the cruddy consumer-level, guaranteed to break within three years junk boxes they sell today. It was a very nice machine and my father was pink with pride about it.
I was working on an art-project at the time, which involved animation cell-painting onto clear sheets of acetate. I'd been running heat-resistant acetate sheets through printers and photo-copiers for a while, outputting line-work for painting on later, so I was all knowledgeable about this. Cocky, even.
But that evening, I'd just used up my last sheet of acetate right in the middle of a job I was really enthusiastic about. I didn't want to wait a whole night just to go out and buy more, so I dug around and actually found a stray sheet. Only problem was, I didn't know where I'd gotten it from, and I didn't know if it was treated for high temperatures or not. .
Can you see where this is going?
Erg. My palms are sweating at the memory. .
So there I was, with this rogue sheet of clear plastic poised over the paper intake of that HP thinking, "Come on! I'm sure it's heat treated. Why would it not be? And anyway, even if it isn't, how bad could things get? Probably at worst, it'd just go a bit warped, right? Just put it through and quit worrying so much, you dork!" So I put it in.
It didn't come out again.
In its place issued a series of interesting sounds and smells. Panic.
My father was in the next room half an hour into watching some hour-long television drama. I remember, clearly, because I can still see in my mind the clock dial telling me that I had exactly 32 minutes to smuggle tools up from the basement, casually walk past the television and into the back room where I was silently, desperately dis-assembling a damned printer.
Have you ever tried to take apart a thirty pound computer appliance on a hardwood floor in total silence as fast as you can? It's difficult! I mean, you drop a single screw and it will bounce off that hardwood with the loudest, "TACK!" you ever heard. And my dad is the suspicious sort who perks his ears up to any unexpected noise. --He spent most of my childhood convinced that his son was a dangerous klutz who could burn down the backyard fence playing with fireworks if given half the chance. (That was a LONG time ago!)
Anyway, my point is that nothing, nothing adds stress to a situation in quite the same way a father does.
While in the process of cutting free a mess of baked-on crusty plastic from the innards of that HP beast, I managed to gouge out big wads of pink rubber stuff from one of the rollers which was certainly not designed to be gouged. That's what you get for rushing. Take the job slowly; you'll only regret it later if you don't. It doesn't matter that you're going to DIE in. . . 14 minutes and counting.
"How's it going in there, Son?"
"Hmm. . ?" Panic. Fear. Adrenaline. Please, please, please, don't come in! Just keep your gnarly head turned toward that flickering TV screen, old man, because I have your fucking printer in pieces all over the floor and crumbs of pink rubber stuff on my guilty fingers. "Oh, just doing some work in Corel Draw, Dad."
"Oh, Corel Draw? Do you need a hand with that? I upgraded to
I dropped my cell phone into a glass of beer next to my laptop, and the beer glass (full) tipped onto the laptop keyboard. I immediately flipped the laptop keyboard down on a carpet, removed everything that could be removed from the back and towelled it out, then flipped it over to vacuum any remaining beer from under the keys. The vacuum sucked the keys right off into a full dust bag. Sliced open the dustbag and spread it all out. Found all but one key, never to be seen again. But.... The laptop lived, and amazingly, so did the cell phone! Now getting the keys back on was not a picnic.