[vipejc]

I don't have any fire stories or anything cool like that, and I've honestly never made a dumb move with a PC in all my eight years. I'm too professional and boring.

[myelin]

I knew that my board had some problem, but never knew what and never got it checked.

Anyway i forgot about it and bought a new harddisk one day and it had its IC immediately blown offcourse i did not noticed it at that time i returned it and got the new one on the same day. So this time instead of attaching the new harddisk i attached my already present hardisk (which had all my lifes work on it!) and boom it stopped working.

The problem was a faulty power supply connector. This happened recently and since than i have been trying to get my harddisk fixed but to no avail!

[Tripredacus]

My first dumb thing was with my first computer! That makes sense right?

My first PC had a 30MB HDD with WFW 3.11 on it. It also was partitioned to J drive letter for some weird reason. So I decided to delete the stuff that was in all the other partitions (besides C... I wasn't that dumb) and then I'd delete those partitions and extend the C volume. I remember seeing that there were other Windows files in those partitions but thought they were a backup or something.

Nope... They were shadow copies. Alas, when I rebooted I got a nice error... to which I formatted the drive and reinstalled WFW.

[awergh]

Last time I remember doing something dumb was when I decided I would install Ubuntu Lite (pretty sure the name changed ages ago but I have no idea what to and this was before then)

I just wasn't paying too much attention and just went through the installer as normal except it decided to wipe my C drive for me

My poor Diablo I saves luckily that was when I reformatted and reinstalled 98SE every few months so not much lost (real data lived on D), I think I had a slightly older Diablo I save I could use; but I never ever try that linux distro again.

[TheWalrus]

Oh I did several awesome things. Like trying to stop the fan in PSU with a screwdriver, only I stuck it a bit too deep. Poof, lighting, and whole technical department with all the machines being tested, installed and whatnot went to sleep. Yay.

Burned graphic card in a similar way. When I think about it, I have a thing for digging in computers with metal object. lol

Bout 3 years ago I managed to spill half bottle of milk in my (then opened and laying on its side as a bonus) home computer. After lots of cursing and cleaning, I sat back... only to spill the REST OF THE **** BOTTLE in it again. I am surprised I didn't destroy anything including myself. There is only so much idiocy one can produce in a day. I think I broke world records that day.




Losing data due to dumb mistakes is not even worth mentioning, been there as well.

[bphlpt]

TheWalrus, on 18 October 2011 - 07:45 AM, said:

Oh I did several awesome things. Like trying to stop the fan in PSU with a screwdriver, only I stuck it a bit too deep. Poof, lighting, and whole technical department with all the machines being tested, installed and whatnot went to sleep. Yay.

Burned graphic card in a similar way. When I think about it, I have a thing for digging in computers with metal object. lol

LOL indeed. I once used a SHARP knife to reach in and try to pry up the CPU clamp, only to dig into the motherboard and cut a trace, (or two or three), ruining the board beyond repair.

And yes, been there done that on loosing data due to idiocy as well.

Late nights, too little sleep, and tight schedules are not a good combination.

Cheers and Regards

[jaclaz]

Not actually a PC, but related.

Very old, small external "particular" case salvaged from a dustbin (literally).
It appeared as a Toshiba external case to add network connectivity to some very early portable (we are talking of 1992 or 1993, so the thingy probably dated back to pre-1990).
Apart from a strange connector with a zillion pins, and a huge card with a number of IC's (some even on sockets ) inside the case there was a small PSU capable of giving BOTH +5V and +12V with enough amps.
Having already:

• a number of SCSI devices
  
• a SCSI PC-Card
  
• a Notebook

I decided to make the thingy into an external SCSI enclosure.
After MUCH work with hacksaw, drill, files, etc. to fit in the case a CD, a ZIP and a hard disk, it was finally ready for the switch-on test.

The only little problem was that during the various disassemble/re-assemble/see if it fits/modify/etc. I had switched the PSU input voltage selector from 250 V to 110 V .

A nice litlle flash and bang later I had a nice enclosure perfectly adapted to host the drives BUT with a non-standard burned PSU.....

jaclaz

[Sysdll]

Back in the '90's I put a new PSU in a computer without checking the red 115/230 switch on the back. It worked for a while and then I noticed smoke coming out of the back of the computer. I lucked out and only the PSU fried.

[CoffeeFiend]

awergh, on 18 October 2011 - 07:10 AM, said:

install Ubuntu

That's got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever done to a PC for sure...

[endlessness]

Many...

1. My city uses 220V power, but I used my PC connected to an UPS which output 110V, thus its PSU was set to 110V. One day the PSU is making a lot of noise, I decide to disassembly the PC in a bench... and promptly plug it in 220V. The PSU seems to be dead silent now... except that it doesn't work anymore.

2. Some 15 years ago, I got my first PC. One day I started installing everything that was on its driver CDs (it was from a manufacturer which made quite a few different models), thus killing my Windows installation.

3. Wanted to delete a directory called 'home' in another HDD, but instead of 'rm -rf home' (I was at /mnt) I typed 'rm -rf /home'.

4. Did an insecure Linux install with easy passwords, enabled SSH and forgot about it for a while... until I remembered my router was forwarding all ports to me, and I had left weak passwords which were easily discovered. Too late: some random IPs had made their way in. I only realized this when I started getting banned from IRC servers for being an open proxy.

[Tripredacus]

endlessness, on 19 October 2011 - 08:12 PM, said:

4. Did an insecure Linux install with easy passwords, enabled SSH and forgot about it for a while... until I remembered my router was forwarding all ports to me, and I had left weak passwords which were easily discovered. Too late: some random IPs had made their way in. I only realized this when I started getting banned from IRC servers for being an open proxy.

This reminds me of something dumb but I didn't do it, but I did get to fix it.

At my old company, we had a file server set up where the IT dept got to put files. This was not on the domain network at the time as we had two networks (and two internet connections). One was for sales and the outward facing servers, the other was for the tech department PC and the deployment network. At some point we decided to redo the network and move this file server onto the domain. So we hooked a monitor up to it and booted it up to join it to the domain. Well that's when we discovered the problem.

The original user account that it was set up with didn't exist, and the default one was suffixed with "II" ... so we couldn't log into it. After we got into the OS, a horrible truth was discovered.... This particular PC (being headless) had been running as an Unreal Tournament dedicated server for at least 5 years!

After all the data was backed up, we wiped it out and reloaded it, and put all the data back. Since I was in charge of naming the servers in the tech department, I wrote up a survey with a list of possible names and passed it out. When I collected all the results, the new name became "Redeemer" which was appropriate considering the prior circumstances.

[allen2]

Not something i did but something i saw at work : a new colleague was customising his PC ( at this time, it was using NT 4.) and logged with his domain admin account, he launched the user manager (usrmgr.exe) and removed all users except 2/3 accounts. The thing is that when you launch on an NT4 usrmgr logged on as domain admin you see by default the domain users/groups and not the local users/groups. So in fact he removed about 2000 users accounts.............It took me more time to understood and cool down than to restore the accounts. We had a good backup and i was able to restore most of the accounts.

[Tripredacus]

This wasn't particularly my fault. A whiteboard fell off the wall (it wasn't mounted very well) and took out the monitor before landing on me. It was quite a surprise!

Spoiler

[vipejc]

This isn't really dumb, but last year I ran a very unstable program called PC Wizard 2009 to get some system and hardware info. I knew that certain options, like password fetching, would cause my system to abend, because this program did it twice or thrice before. But I couldn't remember which options caused the abends. So I was clicking on each icon and then when I got to one, another abend. I had to do a hard shutdown and turn the PC back on. I removed the program after Windows restarted.

This post has been edited by vipejc: 14 January 2012 - 08:04 AM