222 replies to this topic 3 votes

[Mark]

rosszone, on 03 September 2012 - 20:40, said:

diskpart /clean on the wrong hard drive.

Lol, I've formatted the wrong drive on a couple of occasions. I get through several stages of emotions when it happens. Mortification, anger, then acceptance.

[ChrisJ1968]

when I was new to computers, I was fascinated with the inner workings of the Bios chip and messed it up. it was a 386 processor.

[Jips]

1. Went to fix YLOD on a playstation, thought I could save time by putting it in the oven for a short while, then forgot about it
2. Not locking down USB ports on PC's at work - result over 300 PC's and over 100 touchscreens and server farm infected with a virus. 40 hours straight to fix (thankfully production boxes were unix)
3. Vista!!! Nuff said
4. Didn't even put a fan on a cpu on a mates PC on Xmas eve. Phooof!
5. Flashed firmware on my Bluetooth unit in the car, and the car went into eco mode and cut power. fried Eeprom
6. Plugging 240volts into the output of my new UPS units, and tripping out my server room - twice!

I really should re-evalute my job

[Hollywood's Karo]

Almost bricking a Linksys WRT54G-TM Tmobile branded router trying to flash DD-WRT. Turns out the customer's laptop battery was just defunct and luckily Windows gave a battery warning or else it was seconds away from going off mid-flash and I forgot about it yet I MYSELF worked on it hah!

[+Crisp]

Brought a Dell.

[Hum]

ChrisJ1968, on 03 September 2012 - 20:46, said:

when I was new to computers, I was fascinated with the inner workings of the Bios chip and messed it up. it was a 386 processor.

^ I'm not sure if it could be called a mistake, but I 'bricked' my netbook last year, while trying to Update.

I did eventually figure out how to reflash the BIOS chip.

[ChrisJ1968]

Hum, on 03 September 2012 - 20:49, said:

^ I'm not sure if it could be called a mistake, but I 'bricked' my netbook last year, while trying to Update.

I did eventually figure out how to reflash the BIOS chip.

lessened learned from that? I took it into a shop and got a new bios put in. I wasn't meant to touch things I had no idea about

[xfx]

Was drinking and listening to my iPod (second generation) when it slipped from my hands and felt... unfortunately, instead of landing on the floor it landed, perfectly, inside of my rum & coke glass!

After all these years, it still feels sticky!

[Wyn6]

I did the improbable. Before I knew much about building and repairing computers, I had read somewhere you could make your system faster by installing faster memory. I took some memory a friend of mine had just replaced, which was faster than what I had. I cracked open my case, and popped out the old memory just fine.

I installed one stick and it clicked as I pushed it in and the tabs snapped forward. Good so far. I then installed the other stick which was a little harder to get in. But, with a nice forceful push, I snapped it into place. Put the cover back on the case and tried to boot the machine. The lovely, long, single beep issued from the case speaker and then... I smelled smoke. I panicked, pulled the plug on the machine and opened it back up.

Turns out that I somehow managed to put the memory stick in backwards. I know. I know. The slots shouldn't have even allowed this but I did it. The stick was fried as was that particular channel. Amazingly the board was good and the computer booted up and worked fine with the remaining stick and two of the older ones. I also learned not to mix and match memory after this.

So, it only cost me a channel and a stick of memory. But, anybody that I tell that story to always says, "How the hell did you do that? That's near impossible to do." I am Mr. Impossible.

[+exotoxic]

Switching the PSU voltage to see what would happen. Turns out nothing, no smoke, no bang, no flash just a dead PSU.

[+devHead]

The two worst things, this was a while back.

1. My buddy was tinkering with his Gateway 2000 machine back in 1994 trying to change the Windows 3.11 boot splash screen with the logo for the New York Rangers hockey team. He was proving unsucessful, so one afternoon when he was out I had a go at it. I didn't really know what I was doing, and while in DOS, i renamed this bitmap of his (ranger.bmp) to autoexec.bat. As you can imagine, this image was quite a bit larger than the batch file, so when I typed win, I kept getting the message that there wasn't enough memory available to load Windows. Not knowing DOS would automatically create an autoexec.bak file, I ended up taking the Windows 3.11 disk and reinstalling Windows on it! He banned me from his PC for a few weeks. I think back now how much stuff I learned after doing some really stupid things.

2. I had an old Cyrix 586 chip I was going to put into my motherboard, but placed it in wrong. After turning the computer on the sweet smell of burning ceramic came from the board. I toasted the CPU and MOBO. That was a real bummer. Thank goodness for ZIF sockets now!

[Tyler R.]

1. Deleted an old Gmail account only to remember it was tied to my Steam Account. It was really fun getting Valve to change my email for me, as I couldn't get the conformation code. I will never do that again!

2. Bought a G4 PowerMac off my friend for 100 bucks. I should have just flushed it down the toilet.

3. Spent 400 bucks on Windows Vista Ultimate. It was OK after SP1 and NVIDIA came out with decent drivers.

Live and learn!

[Ice_Blue]

Format c: /s /u
without switching back the IDE cables

[+Stocker360]

Buying a G3 iMac in 2011 and expecting it to be usable. Rookie error

[eliokh]

run a sql script on a wrong db schema.
deleted important tables on the development database.!!




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