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."

Worst computer accident?

[Zorilla (791636)]

I'd have to say one of the worst computer accidents I had was ruining my Slashdot ID by attempting a first post.

Honest

[soloport (312487)]

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".

Re:Honest

[by Anonymous Coward]

Could be worse: you could have bought Windows ME

Re:Worst computer accident?

[bigman2003 (671309)]

In 1987 I was a hardware tech- went around to our customers, installed equipment, network cable, etc. etc.

I had put in my two week notice, and on my very last day of work, I had to install a UPS (uninterruptable power supply) at a customer's office is Los Angeles. (The place I worked was in Orange County)

So, I cruised on over, and started the install. This type of UPS actually used car batteries, wired in-line. 8 of them went into the unit. I set it up, tested it, and all I had to do was finish up...

Well, while putting the case back on the UPS unit, I dropped it, and the metal case hit the + and - terminals. The thing was sparking like crazy, the case got burnt, and one of the batteries was bubbling up on top. And the fuse (50 amps) blew.

Since this was about 3:00, and I still had to drive back to OC (geez, people actually associate OC with that crappy show now) and it was my last day. I just plugged everything back directly into the wall, closed the door on their equipment closet, and told them everything was cool.

Went back to the office, got my final check, and of course, didn't mention anything to the boss.

To this day, I still feel bad about it...

(My wife is standing next to me, wondering what the hell I am doing posting this inane story on /. on the 4th of July...when our neighbors have a warm batch of chocolate chip cookies with our names on them...so, sorry if I can't go back and edit the post...I'm being rushed...)

mkswap

[seann (307009)]

mkswap /dev/hda1
instead of swapon /dev/hda3

hda1 = data
mda3 = swap

Re:mkswap

[lubricated (49106)]

I've done this fortunetly ext3fs was buf enough that with a simple fsck to an alternate superblock I was able to get 100% recovery with no data loss. All I had to do was RTFM.

Re:On a similar note...

[EpsCylonB (307640)]

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.

Re:On a similar note...

[Spacelord (27899)]

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.

That was a *mistake*? ;-)

Re:On a similar note...

[EpsCylonB (307640)]

That was a *mistake*? ;-)

I was 11 at the time, and when my dad found out he wasn't very happy...

Mouse Pee

[AngusOg (750443)]

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.

Re:Mouse Pee

[jZnat (793348)]

I'd also recommend that you don't feed your computer. Computers are _inatimate_objects_, not to be confused with pets that need food and water. I know you might think you'll get an extra MHz or 2, but that food is _really_ unneccessary...

Re:Mouse Pee

[broller (74249)]

The manual for my computer said I shouldn't leave the computer in the sun, I shouldn't use water to clean it, I shouldn't make a small fire on top of it and not keep a huge magnet close to it. It said NOTHING about not feeding it with live animals!

Are you sure that's the computer manual and not your Mogwai [google.com] manual?

I bought a Dell.

[ArsSineArtificio (150115)]

Er, that's it, really.

Re:I bought a Dell.

[Zorilla (791636)]

Dude, you're getting a +5 Funny!

The Worst.

[jellomizer (103300)]

Well It was a pretty productive week at work and I was at full force with no time to backup. After finishing about 2000 line HTML and Javascript file I went to the command shell I figured Ill just delete some data files that my tests made. I did an

rm -rf *

I hit enter. Then I Went D'oh! It took me 3 hours of searching threw the Browser Cache to get them back up (then I had to reformat them for my program) I was damn lucky that the browsers kept a cache.

Re:The Worst.

[bwhaley (410361)]

I had a similar problem once. Up until about 2am finishing a TCP/IP simulator program in C for my networking class. Had the project basically finished, was just cleaning up, and did "rm -rf core *" instead of "rm -rf core*" (note the space!). I was using a box with ext3 instead of ext2 - doh! Can't just unmount the filesystem and go find your file with ext3. I had to vi the entire filesystem (~12GB) and patch together pieces of the file. The program never did work right again and I ended up with a B on the assignment (only B ever in that class :(). Needless to say, I learned my lesson and now use Snapshots [mikerubel.org].

In a somewhat unrelated (and more painful) story, using my vast intellect I once attempted to replace a PCI card (of some sort) in a running computer and shocked the shit out of myself. Twice . In less than ten minutes. Apparently I didn't learn that lesson.

- Ben

Re:The Worst.

[by Anonymous Coward]

tar czf /backupdir/`date +%Y%m%d`.tar.gz /home/directory
find /backupdir -name \*.tar.gz -mtime +30 -print0 | xargs -0r


will keep 30 days of full backups. Obviously, if depends on how much space you have, but an IDE disk is cheaper than recreating your work, and unless your work is video editing, your work shouldn't require much space to back up. If you want to get fancier, use incrementals to save space, keep indexes, etc, there's plenty of software out there.

But don't wait for the perfect solution! Start automated, periodic backups now! Drop whatever you are doing and just do it. Don't finish reading this slashdot story. Don't wait until you get something to eat or go to the bathroom. Your pants are less valuable than your data. Backups are not something you can afford to do whenever you get around to it, or to put off doing until you get it perfect.

Well umm

[MrP- (45616)]

This isn't really an accident like spilling something, this is a programming accident.

Several years ago, I was running Win95 I think.. I have this friend who I wanted to scare so I wrote a little app in VB that when he ran would pretend it was erasing his hard drive. It worked good but there was no disk activity so you could tell it was fake. So I decided I'd try opening the files I was listing as being deleted. I tested my code on 1 file, it worked. So I ran the whole program (which would cycle through each directory on the drive, but not sub-directories). When it ended, I was happy because it worked, I had lots of disk activity.

Then I tried opening a program and it said it was corrupt, then I noticed lots of files were corrupt, then I noticed EVERY file on the main directories of my drive were 0 bytes.. That's when I realized my disk activity code was opening every file to have data written to it (the output function in vb i think)..

So basically every file on the root of my drive and in all the main directries (not sub-directories though) were erased.

That sucked.

Re:Well umm

[threephaseboy (215589)]

... programming accident...Win95 ...

Yup.

Re:Well umm

[LastAndroid (695190)]

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.

spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop

[emmastrange (768051)]

$100 to replace the *melted* keyboard. note to self: never remove nail polish near a computer.

Re:spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop

[Colonel Sponsz (768423)]

Whoa. Never had that happen to me, and I use acetone quite frequently for cleaning computers... the inside of them at least. It's an extremely good solvent for most things you want to remove from, say, a CPU or a connector (like dirt, grease or thermal paste - especially the residue left by thermal pads from cheap heatsinks is hell to remove normally), it usually doesn't harm what you are cleaning and it isn't that toxic or flammable.

Spilled a couple of drops of lemon juice on an old Microsoft Natural Keyboard once though... and it actually ate deep pits into the plastic. Hmm... maybe I should try and see what acetone does to it - it is a Microsoft keyboard, and this is Slashdot after all ;-)

chown -R root:root .*

[robolemon (575275)]

Not exactly the worst thing to do, except that it was to someone else's system.

I did a

chown -R root:root .*

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.

Way Back in 1970

[Lucas Membrane (524640)]

I was working a summer job programming a departmental minicomputer in a large (NYSE) company. As I was tidying up my work on my last day, returning to college the following day, I started a re-org on the hard drive. A few seconds later, it occurred to me that I wanted to do something else, so, I hit the reset switch on the machine's front panel.

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.

I did something similar..

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

2 hard drives, one power supply

[flinxmeister (601654)]

I learned the hard way that backing your data up to another hard drive does no good when the power supply freaks out and fries *everything*...including BOTH hard drives.

Luckily, I had bought matching drives for use in another computer (a total of 4 HDs). By removing the controllers from the good drives and carfully placing them on the fried drives, I was able to get everything back.

Word to the wise, backup and keep off box and off site!

Not mine but..

[kunudo (773239)]

A friend of mine stuck a screwdriver in his computers power supply because the fan was "making too much noise"... He used it with the screwdriver blocking the fan for maybe 6 months before the entire thing blew up and fried every single component in the computer...

Then he asked if I could fix it...

Being robbed

[Ugodown (665450)]

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.

Duck poop fried my keyboard...

[RoTNCoRE (744518)]

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?

Re:Duck poop fried my keyboard...

[by Anonymous Coward]

This is totally off-topic... as no computer was involved... but your duck poop brought to mind one of the funniest incidents I have seen in a long time.

I was at Disneyland ( California ). There were a gaggle of ducks around the area around the boats. A young child, full of the magic of the Disney environment, excitedly chased, and caught, a duck, holding it up high for all to see. "Momma! Momma! I gotta Duck!!!!".

Well, the duck let fly with a humongous amount of poop. Didn't know that much poop could fit in a duck.

The kid was drenched. He had an audience of at least 1,000 onlookers each having cameras to capture magic moments. Everywhere I looked, the kid was at the center of hundreds of lenses. And the look on his momma's and poppa's face...

The duck was promptly released, and the kid and parents just kinda disappeared.

Rookie Linux mistake

[eatenn (572604)]

About 7 years ago I decided to give Linux a try. I ordered a bunch of distro's off the web and my irc friends urged me to install Debian.

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.

My poor 486

[MadCamel (193459)]

Way back in the day, when a 486dx/66 was *hot stuff*, I had an interesting day. I started by inserting the CPU backwards. It emitted a large puff of smoke and a horrible squealing sound. Surprizingly enough after correcting the CPU orientation it still worked. Later in the day while fiddling with it, I bumped the tower and it fell out the second story window on to a concrete pad. Since it was not screwed together properly, it took the fall rather well, the only casualty being the case (Bent to hell), and the massive-for-the-day 2gig harddrive, which still worked, albeit at less-than-floppy speeds with a horrible click-clack sound every 10 seconds. Recovering my data took 10 days, with the computer living in a cardboard box. I had this bad habit of heating cans of spaghetti-O's on the CPU, but nothing ever came of it (thankfully).

SQL "Delete" Statement, without a "Where" clause

[John_Booty (149925)]

Back in my first year or two of programming full-time, I deleted some LIVE data belonging to a customer, because I forgot the "where" clause. For those not familiar with SQL, you'd say the following to delete only certain rows from a table:

"Delete From SomeTable Where SomeTable.SomeField > 500"

However, if simply you type:

"Delete From SomeTable"

...that will delete all rows from that table. (Actually, I did type the WHERE clause, but I had only part of the statement highlighted, so that's the only part that got executed.)

What a nightmare. Obviously it was my own stupid fault, but to make matters worse, the IT dudes weren't performing nightly backups as they'd promised, compounding the problem. Recovery of the table from the transaction logs proved impossible for several reasons. It cost our company a few thousand dollars to re-conduct our client's survey and we had to endure a lot of screaming.

I consider myself lucky to have done this early in my career, on a small job that amounted to thousands of dollars instead of 5-, 6-, or 7-figure dollar amounts. I figure it's the sort of thing that everybody does once and never does again. ...Right? :P I've continued to work with SQL databases for the past 7 years, and I literally NEVER execute a DELETE statement without thinking about that fateful day. Never ever, even if it's data that doesn't matter.

Re:SQL "Delete" Statement, without a "Where" claus

[daveewart (66895)]

Nasty - best way to do a "DELETE ... WHERE" if you're at an SQL console is to do ...

"SELECT something FROM table WHERE conditions"

then, once you're happy that it's showing you the things to delete, backup the command and remove the "SELECT something" and replace it with "DELETE". Much safer :-)

When I was in college and Linux was young...

[Fished (574624)]

When I was in college, I would (once or twice a semester) drink ... to excess. This was in the early 90's, I had a Linux box, and I was pretty stinking impressed with myself for having 'root' on it. One night, stinking drunk and stinking impressed, I created a directory called '*' in the root directory of my hard drive. I was utterly impressed with my own wisdom and capabilities and /power/, being young, drunk, and root.

The next morning, I wake up, somewhat hung over, and decide that this directoy was a /stupid/ idea. So, I execute the obvious command:

rm -rf /*

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.)

Don't drop the server.

[krhainos (637354)]

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 :-/

My Top 10 List

[Devil's BSD (562630)]

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.
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 /" trick
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:\ /Y to a Windows NT Logon script. Ah, the good old senior pranks.
1. Posting this list on Slashdot.

Exploding Quantum hard drive

[Limburgher (523006)]

I was transferring a large amount of data from a Quantum Fireball hdd that was beginning to act up to a new Western Digital, via IDE. I had the case laying open, and the Quantum was not mounted in the case, but just laying on anti-static foam on the desk next to it.

I left the room to fetch lunch, and I heard a loud CRACK! I ran back in, and was confronted with the following:

The computer was off. The air smelt of ozone. There was a little stream of smoke rising from the Quantum. There was a large chunk missing from the main controller chip on the Quantum's board. 15 minutes of searching revealed that the chunk had flown 12 feet and landed behind another desk.

I was lucky enough to have a duplicate Quantum on hand whose controlled board I could use, so I swapped it out long enough to finish the transfer. Luckily, the CHS specs were the same, so nothing was lost.

Get Computer Insurance

[savetz (201597)]

I cannot overstate this: get computer insurance. It's cheap and will more than pay for itself if you have a hardware loss. I use Safeware.com, paying about $120 a year for $11,000 of hardware insurance - this covers loss by fire, theft, water, accidental damage, pretty much everything except earthquake and theft from an unattended vehicle. (I could have opted for a more expensive policy to cover those possibilities, too.) Just last week I dropped my digital camera, killing it. That model (Canon Powershot S30) is no longer available, so the insurance company is paying for a new model (Powershot S50) that costs more than what I originally paid for my digital camera two years ago.

My first Trojan Horse

[rworne (538610)]

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.

Duron crushed core

[duckpoopy (585203)]

I, and about a million other people, crushed the core of a Duron procerssor while clipping the fan on. Not content to be included in such a broad statistic, I crushed the second one too. So then I loosened up the fan clip by bending it, and didn't put any thermal goop on the back of the fan. This time I actually got to the bios screen before the third processor burned up...

Flaming Death

[SharpFang (651121)]

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.

I can't believe he said this

[ctwxman (589366)]

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.

PowerBook + SUV = not so good

[ryochiji (453715)]

I accidentally ran over my 12" PowerBook G4 with my dad's SUV about a year ago. Believe it or not, other than a crumpled corner (under the hard drive) and a 10 pixel high band of funky colors on the LCD, it survived intact.
So I kept using it.

Then this Spring, I fell down the stairs with it, and that gave me a bunch of funky colors on the screen, rendering the LCD useless (I'm guessing it's just a pinched cable). But I'm still using it, to type this post actually, with an external monitor and keyboard.

A word of advice...

[iamdrscience (541136)]

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:

While typing "rm -rf /somedir/file/" you bump enter while you hit slash (they're right next to each other, remember) resulting in "rm -rf /"

If you're in the habit of typing the flags at the end (i.e. "rm /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.

Knocked over an Entire Rack

[Lordofohio (703786)]

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.

ninja iguana

[spacerodent (790183)]

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.

Re:Cookies in the psu

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A solution to almost all liquid problems

[HeghmoH (13204)]

And why pay for soda when water's free and doesn't expand your waistline or rot your teeth?

Because it tastes good?

Re:A solution to almost all liquid problems

[CountBrass (590228)]

I was going to moderate this but I couldn't find "-1, self-righteous" in the list.