What are your worst computing mistakes?

[Renvy]

Tried to install hackintosh. So I partitioned one empty partition and the other with windows with my school files.

I then accidentally defragmented my windows drive to Mac Os Journal Extended. I lost a lot of important school files which set me a few weeks back.

[Shane Nokes]

Tried to install hackintosh. So I partitioned one empty partition and the other with windows with my school files.

I then accidentally defragmented my windows drive to Mac Os Journal Extended. I lost a lot of important school files which set me a few weeks back.

You mean repartitioned?

[Xtreme2damax]

Forgetting to put the cpu socket guard over the socket before cleaning thermal paste around the edges of the socket. Ended up bending and breaking some of the cpu pins, cost me $200 to replace the motherboard.

[SharpGreen]

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!

Actually did brick a Netgear WNDR3300 trying to flash an updated DD-WRT. Had it in recovery mode, could've possibly fixed but then turned it off and it was gone forever.

Also, failing to back crap up then wiping a drive (in my main machine) containing 4 or 5yrs of work on my various programs. Now I have another machine that hosts a mercurial install containing all my code. The only code that touches my main machine now is what I'm working on, and even that is checked back in after each change, small or large. Though better than before, I still need to implement something that backs all that code up to somewhere offsite.

[Slammers]

Nothing too bad really. When I was like 10 I was staying at my parents friends and they had a 486 that wasn't working in the room. Seeing I had been using a 486 at home I though I could fix it haha. I took one look at the back and decided to flick that little red switch on the powersupply (read voltage settings). Turn on, flash, bang (huge fright), smoke, put computer back and and never told anyone ahahahah. Was mortally scared of powersupplys till the age of 13.

[Sylar0]

Well while were admitting flaws, I ONCE deleted my personal external HDD had to use recovery software had personal family stuff on it... lucky I got recovery software on it fast got it all back but took 2 weeks to sort again....

[Colin McGregor]

fell for the linux hype and installed gentoo linux and actually used it.

[Guest LiquidCrystalMeth]

After too many hours (18 hours) bathed in the glow of my 3 LCD's at work, i diskpart cleaned the wrong 320Gb HDD

TestDisk to the rescue :)

Thats the worst ive made in 30+ years of tech support, thank god. Seen plenty of really bad mistakes, and a lot of that mysterious blue smoke :)

At least ive never installed Win8

[Detection]

After too many hours (18 hours) bathed in the glow of my 3 LCD's at work, i diskpart cleaned the wrong 320Gb HDD

TestDisk to the rescue :)

Thats the worst ive made in 30+ years of tech support, thank god. Seen plenty of really bad mistakes, and a lot of that mysterious blue smoke :)

At least ive never installed Win8

I almost formatted a HDD holding every customers restaurant menu designs from a small printers shop once, when I realised what I had just done I pulled the power with an instant sweat appear on my forehead

Luckily slow XP and fast reflexes saved the day

I was not so lucky a few years ago when I was backing up full outlook emails/profiles etc for every machine in head office and somehow managed to not backup the CEO/Boss' outlook before we switched servers/domains... was not a popular boy for a while

[Shane Nokes]

At least ive never installed Win8

Indeed. We wouldn't actually want you to be productive. :shiftyninja:

[Guest LiquidCrystalMeth]

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.

Sorry had to quote this, thats the best thing ive read all week

Mortification, anger, then acceptance.

I can see that process in my head, as i suspect, can many

[Sylar0]

Sorry had to quote this, thats the best thing ive read all week

Mortification, anger, then acceptance.

I can see that process in my head, as i suspect, can many

Ill third it.

[Guest LiquidCrystalMeth]

Indeed. We wouldn't actually want you to be productive. :shiftyninja:

Sorry, Shane, not biting today :)

[tsupersonic]

What are your worst computing mistakes?

Building one.

That's the best thing you can do! Hmm, my worst mistake has to be installing Ubuntu (or for that matter, any Linux distro. I have tried). Sure, it's free, but it always broke after the updates, which required tons of time to fix (or reformat) or Linux experts telling me "I'm doing it wrong" rather than helping to fix the problem. Time = money, so Linux != free

[Detection]

That's the best thing you can do! Hmm, my worst mistake has to be installing Ubuntu (or for that matter, any Linux distro. I have tried). Sure, it's free, but it always broke after the updates, which required tons of time to fix (or reformat) or Linux experts telling me "I'm doing it wrong" rather than helping to fix the problem. Time = money, so Linux != free

lol yea I enjoy it, but it has made me an unfit, wider than before recluse vs the bouncy full of energy kid with a six-pack and real friends

[Biotoxic_hazard_835]

Dismantling the insides of my desktop without properly grounding myself, fried the damn mobo.

[ANON86364]

We had a client who we were building two custom PCs for. One was to be shipped to Washington state, the other to Texas. I had everything perfectly setup so they could literally open up the box, turn it on, and VPN, Outlook, everything was all setup.

I shipped each one to the wrong location, priority overnight. About a $600 mistake.

[Dilligaf2008]

run a sql script on a wrong db schema.

deleted important tables on the development database.!!

back up was 2 months old

:rolleyes:

I can sympathize there - about 2 months ago, accidentally left out a where clause on a sql script, ended up deleting every entry on a table...

Thought to myself "Dammit!...ah well, I'll just have to recover it from the backups..."

Checked the backups (which I thought had been running daily) - last backup was sometime in March...

Lesson learnt: Backups! Backups! Backups! Every morning now, I check and double check to make sure both our on-site and online backups are running.

[firey]

don't really have many. Mostly formatting USB sticks I don't mean to. The only major thing I did was quickly fixed with a call to intel, was I tried upping the speed of my ram to 1333 which my MOBO supported but my RAM didn't (or other way around) and my PC would reboot right after post. Clearing CMOS didn't fix it, had to call intel and ended up having to reset the CMOS by moving a Jumper from operation to reset mode and reboot and reset up the CMOS and BIOS settings.

[Slammers]

I remember at primary school some kid told me that there was a game creator program in the control panel in windows 3.1.

I vividly remember the day being the longest ever as I waited to get home to find this program and make a game. I spent hours looking everywhere in 3.1 (although not many places to look - I was a kid) and literally clicking every possible thing I could.

Not really a bad mistake, but funny nonetheless. I never did find that game maker....

[Rippleman]

Wiped a hard drive for a customer. The son brought it in, and said wipe it and clean it, so i did, the mother came in to pick it up and asked where her 3000 pics were. :(

[wrack]

Buying a Matrox Graphic Card for a Gaming System...

[Charisma Veteran]

I did an rm -rf * in the wrong directory. On a live production server.

I don't want to talk about it.

[Pam14160]

The truly sad thing is, "I am just not smart enough to do something stupid, also that is the reason I am always doing stupid things."

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

while hotswapping a drive I accidentally plugged the power connector the wrong way. bye bye hard drive. luckily it wasn't my main drive or i would have been even more furious.

oh and another time I was resizing a partition on an external HD, and i accidentally unplugged the USB cable before it was completed...

i had to spend hours recovering my data.... not fun.