What was your worst PC disaster?

[chris-harry]

well... has anyone eletricuted themselfs? luckily i havent... now that would really really damage your pride...


C-H little story

Bob- (trying to replace a graphics card in his computer all the while his girlfriend is watching).. Its as easy as (gets severly electricuted when touches mother board and screams like a girl).

Bob's Girl- Next time, make sure the power is off.

now... bob was owned... really owned...

[chris-harry]

plus you could do worse then that... you could do this



*singing* burn baby burn

[gnarvaja]

The worst one I had to recover from was actually from a customer. Hundreds of thousands of dollars daily transfers depended on the system. It went like this:

RECEIPE FOR DISASTER
Ingredients:
1 Power cable going accross the floor in the middle of a path where people walk constantly back and forth
1 Old/slow PC with insufficient HD space
2 Unexperienced PC operators
1 Limited budget
1 Dusty environment

Preparation
1. Define procedures to purge backup and purge DB to avoid the *disk full* syndrome. Make sure backup procedure is fool proof, for example, use Hanoi Tower rotation of disk sets always storing and extra blank formatted disk. This way if you don't have today's backup, you'll have yesterdays, or 4 days ago, or a week ago and so on. The Hanoi Tower rotation avoids using the same disks over and over again until you can see through them. For performance reasons the purge is done with no transactions, hence the recomendation to make a backup before doing it.
2. Due to budget restrictions, there weren't always disks available to complete the sets, so the users would use the disks of set C to complete the backup of set A among other transpositions Not necessarily registering the order of the disks.
3. Here you have 2 alternatives:
a. Since the operator is in a rush, skips the backup and goes on with the purge. Since the purge is taking some time, decides to reboot the PC before it ends.
b. Kick the power cord while the purge is running.
4. The oeperators are in a rush, so they don't report the error messages until the system doesn't work anymore.
5. The backups are performed every morning on the corrupted databases, with the disk permutations, effectively ruining any chance of getting reliable data.
6. Did I mention that the disks where often lying around in a dusty environment?

Presentation
Call the programmer to fix the problem telling him that due to budget restrictions they don't really have the money to pay full fare.

Note from the consultant: They were in wine country, so the location had other perks

[crazygopedder]

Well once I over loaded the motherboard and killed the processor fan connection, effectivly melting the processor. Second on an older computer, it had an option to up the clock speed of the CPU. While working the in menu I accedently upped it by 200mhz (it was a 300 machine) and the blew the entire motherboard.

Yea, lots of fun.

ROFL

That's great

[benjamin1254]

the worst pc problem i have ever had was when i got my vary first computer... oh thoes were the days.. it was referbished but to me it was new... running windows 95. For the fist cupple days it was ok ... we did some basic training on our new computer we had just goten (for free i might add). But then the internet came around. Man i remember i was downloading like crazy. I dident even reslize how much space i had on the hard drive. 1 gig was all i had and back then i dident know the size of things and how fast they could go. I continually downloaded more and more untell i was left with nothing. no space at all. I dident know why we were having problems with the computer starting up it just wouldent start up like it did. ane even then we werent protected ... no firewall was there to stop anything from coming in or going out. no filter not even antivirus. so a cuppl times we lost the computer.. and we would have to re instal alot of times. then i just got tired of reinstalling windows and made the biggest mistake i could ever not think of. what i did was when the computer came back to us i was really cheezed by restarting it takin it out to be repaired and what not. so i compressed the hard drive. needless to say windows never started again! now flash up to a few years ahead when windows ME was big. that was my second worst mistake ... getting a windows me computer. needless to say after it tickin me off i moved over to linux.. and so far i have never had any problems with it!

[chris-harry]

lol... getting win me being the biggest mistake... ahahaha I think thats everyones big mistake....

[JeniSkunk]

My worst computer disaster was actually caused by being a Linux newbie.
November 2000 I bought the boxed set of Caldera Open Linux 2.3 and went to install it in the 4Gb area I'd cleared for Linux on my 9.1Gb HD as I wanted to dual-boot Win98 and Linux. At the time I had no idea about the 1024 cylinder limit.
I went through the Caldera install installing everything, or so I thought, then installed BootMagic after the install which hadn't worked. After realising that Caldera had not installed, I went to reinstall it, this time noting the 1024 cylinder limit. That complete install worked well, except for the fact that LILO got writen to the MBR. Trying to fix that mess rendered the 9Gb HD unbootable, and the 5Gb of pre-existing data inaccessible till I could get a data recovery util.


Jenifur Charne

[Seyyapc]

New on overclocking my First overclock was with a Pentium II processor, you 've to block some contacts with solid adhesive tape or nail paint. After some shots finally I was lucky for a time and keep the Overclock for all the night, when I wake up the next night the computer was really dead .

Removing the processor the contacts, on both the processor and the mobo were burned , I've to buy a new processor and mobo

[pureone]

it all started a month back when my sisters computer felt like dieing. she got a new pc within the last 72hours cost £10. its a old beast

CPU[Pentium II (Klamath) clocked at 233.868 Mhz]  Kernel[Linux 2.4.26 i686]  Up[-46min-]  Mem[-59.1719/60.5234MB-]  HDD[-4GB(13%used)-]  Procs[-36-]  Client[Shell]

(infobash) http://rebelhomicide.demon.nl/scripts/

first night it was working nicely. but the computer seemed to have the same problems as the last computer that died. the monitor wouldnt work right. so my sister went to turn it off with what she though was the power off switch. but turned out to increase the voltage. the pc went bang. i changed the power supply on it(next day) and got it to work agian. but it would not work right (wouldnt boot from cd) so i changed the ide cables and then it wouldnt work at all. well after hours of messing around with differnt ways to put the ide cables i had to call my dad to help me.

my last major lose of data was from trying to install suse with out reading the manual before hand. i really messed up my hard drive that way. i managed to lose all my data i was lucky enough to have knoppix to save my most important data(web sites i made mainly).

[gildedlink]

Worst? I dunno, I've had so many... I'll start with a few.

Scenario 1- '97 (I think...)- My family got our first comp. Twas an IBM Aptiva(555 maybe? It's in my sis' room now). Now I used to be on that thing all the time, and I once learned... tada! how to download! I was restricted to aol, but i downloaded all the games I could from there, well over 40 games, and played them, and the ones that came with the comp (tons, i remember it came with mechassault 2, and Lotus 1-2-3... ok so maybe Lotus wasn't a game, but why not install anyway? :P). After I had downloaded all this in my 56k download-binge, our computer mysteriously started losing mouse function, with windows not detecting it (this later became a historic beginning to the other ones I owned). My mother called IBM, having no clue what was going on, and it was all because of Hard drive space XD. She, being less informed than I at the time, doesn't trust my advice and lets someone 'take a look at it', who installs Win98 and a an ATI video card, makes the speakers built in the monitor not work, etc and charges her a considerable amount on top of that. It is now in my sister's room, devoid of use most often.

Scenario 2- Later my mother bought a gateway. i could download more, but not much out of courtesy. Now here's where I did something that wasn't bad at all, unless you have an mother like that: I changed the properties of the recycle bin so that deleted files would skip it entirely. What is wrong with that you ask? Nothing, except maybe that my mom (the genius she is, god bless her XD) stored legal documents in the recycle bin thinking no one would look there...brilliant.

Scenario 3- The first laptop I ever got. It was used, I checked all the info I could that it was a good buy. An older IBM Thinkpad (something 775), priced at $250. Now if you haven't noticed, I have a tendancy to delete very little, and this laptop had a 995 meg drive- bad combination. I load alot of my cd's and such onto this bad boy so i no longer only had them on cdrom, but slowly keys stop working (the 2-3 days after I bought it). I find a hardware solution, considering these were the ones with quick removable keyboard: press down a small wire in the back of it and the keys worked fine. So I use some 'ingenuity' and stick a small folded piece of paper under the keyboard so it'd hold down that wire for me. The next time I reboot, very few of the keys work. Whats the major problem in that? The comp had a bios password when I got it., and none of the number keys i needed to ener that pass were there. What is my solution? I remove the CMOS battery and it works a bit. After awhile, though, for some unknown reason, it just died starting up one day. Now all I had was a high tech night-light, that hung right after shoeing the wallpaper background I had and never fully loaded windows or any of that. I was forced to trash it.

Those are only 3, and I've been through alot more, but thats a bit of history as is. I haven't lost the lessons of all those mistakes to this day, so I'm still optimistic. I have tons more horor stories but those are the historic selections.