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."

2 hard drives, one power supply

[flinxmeister]

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!

Second Worse

[jellomizer]

Well I was learning some new C commands for Unix.
So I tried out this program.

#include <unistd.h>
int main()
{
fork();
main();
return 0;
}

and I ran it. At the time 1998 I had a beefy system A duel Pentium 200mhz with Linux and a Matrox Millennium II Vedio Card and 128 megs of Ram. It took about 1 second before the computer became unusable. And Linux never booted back after that. I had to do a complete reinstall. And after that the video card never worked that well and it was always flaky.
My theory was that the program filled up the RAM quickly then started swapping to the disk and some how overwritten parts of my file system. And the Duel Processors overtasked my Video card causing something to get a little more juce then though was possible. I have never tried that on a newer version of linux.

Electric Dreams

[secolactico]

I accidentally spilled a drink onto my laptop's keyboard where it drained into the laptop's innards

Did the computer fall in love with the girl upstairs? (the one you had your eyes on)? It's been known to happen [imdb.com].

Re:spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop

[__aagctu1952]

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 ;-)

Milk

[localman]

Back in the day, I was hacking away with my Commodore 64 while enjoying a tall glass of milk. On the floor next to my desk was a large open disk organizer, containing over a hundred 5 1/4 inch disks. This collection represented years of pirating (who said that!) and at least as much time game writing [binadopta.com]. Backups? Sure -- all in the same box.

Anyways, an errant elbow movement sends the glass of milk careening into the disk organizer and just about every disk is saturated. I may have actually cried.

But then was the cool part: I could not accept that my life was over, so I decided to fix the disks. Over the course of a week I cut open every disk jacket, took out the actual magnetic diskette, and washed them gently by hand. I then put them back into a clean, freshly cut jacket and tried them out.

All but one disk survived this process. (A commercial copy of Ultima III).

Try that with today's floppies!

Cheers.

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

[daveewart]

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 :-)

Re:spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop

[BinaryC]

I find rubbing alcohol works great for every computer cleaning problem I've run across. Best part is it evaporates pretty quickly without leaving an ugly or conductive residue.

Re:2 hard drives, one power supply

[notanatheist]

That's when you replace your power supply with a real one from Sparkle Power, Fortron Source, Antec, PC Power & Cooling, etc... that *if* it did blow you greatly reduce the chance of any of your components being lost. Anybody trusting their data to a Deer power supply or any other $25 400Watt power supply needs a boot to the head. Size is *NOT* as important as quality. Try and argue that.

Re:wrong dir

[Badanov]

You haven't lived until you've cleared out about 30 custom server maitenance scripts through: what else? Another script.

That's when I decided chattr +i /customdir/scripts is my best friend. It's a pain to edit scripts, but it has saved my bacon.

Re:The Worst.

[Anonymous Coward]

I call BS (or DS).

First, why would you attempt to remove 'core*' ?? The name of the file is 'core'. Why would you add a wildcard to it? You also don't need the '-r', though I can see how people would add that out of habit.

Second, you can't get shocked by PCI bus voltages. If you got shocked it was caused by electro-static discharge. The lesson you should learn is to properly ground yourself before handling electronics.

Re:wrong dir

[sigaar]

I've done the same thing when losing track of which server I'm working in (having multiple ssh connections to various machines to compare config files, ect.)

Learned to rename my konsoles....

Unison File Synchronizer

[Convergence]

I use this (open source) program [upenn.edu] to bidirectionally sync/replicate my laptop and my desktop machines. As long as I modify different parts of both replicas, it'll move changes bidirectionally. If I modify the same part of both replicas, I can use the GUI to examine the conflicts and resolve it manually. The GUI also shows a summary of the changes the program wishes to make. It even runs under windows and can sync windows directories with unix directories!

It makes my desktop and laptop machines virtually indistinguishable from each other. This means I can and do interchangably use as many as 4 different machines. At the next sync, whatever I was working on gets moved to the other machines. (Unison only supports pairwise syncs, so I sync pairs A&B, A&C, A&D.) One of these machines is in a seperate building.

Since I sync machines with each other regularily, as a byproduct, each is an hours to days old backup of the others. A great freebie offered by a valuable program. I don't worry about dataloss nearly as much as I used to.

Anyone who uses more than one machine regularily should look into this program.

Re:chown -R root:root .*

[dspeyer]

chown -R root:root .*

Ouch. Now I realize that the right expression for this is not easy to come up with. I think .!(|.) would work if you are using bash with extended globing enabled. But can anybody come up with something better with the same result.

This is when I do things like find . -iname '.*'|awk '{print "chown root:root " $0}'|less and then check it by hand. If it looks right, replace less with sh and let it run.

Hope this Helps,

Re:The Worst.

[bwhaley]

Ok troll, I'll bite...

First, why would you attempt to remove 'core*' ?? The name of the file is 'core'. Why would you add a wildcard to it? You also don't need the '-r'...

Core files can have dates tagged on to the ends to help keep track of different cores. Furthermore, My program consisted of several directories, with executables in each, thus the possibility for the existence of core files in each.

Second, you can't get shocked by PCI bus voltages.

Where did I was say that the PCI bus shocked me? I said I was replacing a PCI card (or something else, I don't remember for sure) and got shocked.

Your lesson: Don't take things so literally, you end up looking like a nitpicking jack ass.

Re:Cheap power supply

[Cecil]

If by reliable components you mean reliable powersupplies, there are a few brands which are well known to be high quality and reliable.

Antec is considered to be the top end for reliability and performance. They contain seperate transformers for the different voltage rails. I have 3 Antec powersupplies in my computers. All have worked great.

Enermax is another maker of very beefy powersupplies. I've got one and haven't had a problem with it.

There's bad news, though. 50% premium? No. Try 200%, if you're used to those shitty $30 powersupplies. A 380W Antec will set you back somewhere in the region of $90. It's worth it, though. Cooler powersupply, cooler system, increased stability due to lower temperature and solid voltage.

Some reviews at Tech-report [tech-report.com] and AnandTech [anandtech.com] should give you some baselines to look at.

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

[mcrbids]

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

Yeah, I've done that one a few times - though I'd always had backups 24 hours old. I've gotten into the habit if typing "begin transaction;" first!

EG:

Begin transaction; DELETE FROM table WHERE condition;

Then hit enter, see how many records were nuked (basic sanity check, if I see 217,000 records deleted I can be pretty sure the next statement would be "rollback;"

If all's well, THEN I type "commit;";

Can't do this on MySQL 3, however, but that's rare since I develop primarily on PostgreSQL.

Another good habit, if you're doing much work, is to write a cron script that dumps all your database stuff to your own home directory, if you have the room.

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

[juhaz]

(If there is transactions in MySQL, I stand corrected, but they must have added the support just recently)

I guess it debends on your definition of "recent", transaction-supporting InnoDB has been there for two years or so. Default type is still transactionless, though.

Re:mkswap

[Alexis de Torquemada]

rm: cannot remove '.' or '..'

Seems like they fixed this problem.

PS: I was actually too cowardly to try this in /home, but I did run it as root. :)

Ahh young grasshopper

[Sycraft-fu]

You understand the ways of economics and bussiness. So allow me to enlighten you:

Insurance is a for profit bussiness, at least in the US. The make more money than they pay out. That means, on average, insurance will NOT pay for itself. You will pay them more than they give you back. They set their premiums as such, otherwise, it just could not work.

So why have insurance? Well you have it for things you can't afford to replace, or those required by law. Like health insurance. I pay in $25, and my employer $260, to give me comprehensive health insurance. It covers everything that might go wrong with me, at almost no additonal cost.

Well, if you do the math, that's $3400 per year paid for it. I have never, not even when I got in a car accident and went to the hospital, spent that much on healthcare in a year. I would be much better off financially if I took that money and put it in an intrest bearing account, and used it only for health care needs.

So why don't I do that (pretending for this example that my employer would give me their portion of the payin)? Well because my health is important to me, and repairs to my body could easily exceed my financial means. If I got seriously hurt, or a chronic disease or something, the cost could shoot above $100,000, well over anything I could pay even if I saved the $3400/year for a number fo years.

In all likelyhood, the insurance company will make money on me. However I am willing to allow them to do that for the promise that, if something should go severly wrong, they will loose money on me to try and keep me alive and healthy.

Well, my computer isn't the same. Supposing the whole thing blew up, I'd need to spend about $2000 to replace it. A financial difficulty for sure, but something I could afford. What's more, it's not critical like my health. If I were without a computer for some time I'd be sad (and end up hanging out in my office to play on the Internet at night) but it wouldn't harm me at all.

Insurance like this is only worth it if:

1) The hardware is critical to you for some reason. If, for example, your bussiness relies on it then yes, you want to be covered since the money you loose due to it being gone could be ruinous.

2) It would be financially extremely difficult or impossible to replace the hardware yourself.

If you don't meet those two conditions, you should probably not waste your money on insurance. Instead put that $120/year away, and you'll find that you probably can pay for any failures AND have enough left over to get better hardware.

Re:mkswap

[linuxelf]

Now if only Solaris 7 had that same protection, I could have saved myself a LOT of time! What was funny is, it was only supposed to be like 10 - 15 files. I issued the command, and saw the drives light up. It ran for about 4 seconds before I just thought "This *can't* be right." (heh)

Re:The Worst.

[scrod]

Well, there is the GPL tool Recover [sourceforge.net], which works on ext2 file systems. You could use this, or you could follow these steps [tldp.org] manually.

Re:My Top 10 List

[Anonymous Coward]

9. Sitting on a brand new Pentium 4 accidentally, bending all the pins

It might not sound too funny to break a cpu like that, but the worst thing I've done was put my palm down on the floor to lift myself up, and press it into all pins on a 486 (why was it on the floor? who knows). Ouch.

It didn't do much until a few hours later, after I'd extracted the pins and thought it'd need a little healing. The inflammation from a hundred little PGA holes perforating my skin came up so hard that the base of my thumb was immobile and hurt like all fuck. Next night I was in emergency with an infection that run down my wrist, and some pretty severe necrosis of the skin in that spot. There was just so much inflammation from so many piercings that blood could no longer reach the tissue around it.

Given a couple of week's treatment the skin sloughed off, and I still have a massive scar on the area I hit those pins. Very well worth avoiding

Re:spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop

[vladkrupin]

As you said, it is an extremely good solvent. Too good, in fact. Acetone will soften and dissolve many plastics. Try alcohol instead. Something like 90+% ethanol or rubbing alcohol is just as good at cleaning what you probably want to clean, leaves no residue, stinks less and is safe on almost any plastic, in fact on almost any computer part.

I use acetone sparingly and only in cases where alcohol won't do the job well, but acetone will. I also use it to make 'plastic goo' which you can later use as some sort of a plastic clay in some projects.

Re:Mouse Pee

[TexasDex]

From an IBM Thinkpad manual:

"Do not pour liquids into the computer."

You can't say they didn't warn you!

Talk about manuals written on drool-proof paper.

I crashed Israel's Ministry of Defense main server

[demiurg]

Well... nothing can compete with this - some time ago I was working as sysadmin in Israel's Ministry of Defense. It was a crazy time (10 years ago) when sophomore student with some Linux knowledge could get a job of sysadmin responsible for some mission critical applications running on a variety of Unixes. Well... I knew Linux. I really did. In fact, it turned out I knew Linux too good. I even knew the very helpful killall(1) command, which, as it turned out, does some very different things on Linux and Digital OSF Unix :) I learnt that subtle difference in Linux implementation of killall(1) when Ministry of Defense Oracle server (along with bunch of other mission critical apps) died a very painful, but short death :)

Re:The dangerous tool that is called dd

[samjam]

It doesn't always help to enclose variable names in quotes although you are right to make it a habbit; so many shell scripts lose the quoting in the internal logic. SH makes it hard to write safe scripts like this.

As an aside do you know the difference between:
$*
"$*"
$@
"$@"

Tip 2:
when writing shell script wrappers; make sure to exec the final program or your wrapper eats the return value as well as wasting a process table slot.

e.g.

#! /bin/sh

#setup
#noww run
exec /bin/originalprogram

Sam

Re:The dangerous tool that is called dd

[samjam]

The only one that is inconsistent with normal variable handling is "$@", but you're right that this is something to be careful with.

True; but "$@" is generally the only safe one to use in simple wrappers for passing through the args untouched.

In my sample I forgot to do:

exec /bin/original "$@"

Sam