What Was Your Worst Computer Accident? 1542
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."
mkswap (Score:5, Interesting)
instead of swapon
hda1 = data
mda3 = swap
Mouse Pee (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
HD Bomb (Score:1, Interesting)
I've mistankely swapped the +5V and +12V inputs in a HD and it exploded big time.. The whole circuit board got into fire.
spilling acetone on a sony vaio laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
chown -R root:root .* (Score:5, Interesting)
I did a
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.Personal Injury via Rack Mount Case Cover (Score:2, Interesting)
I turned around, bumped the cover with my foot, which proceeded to fall on my shin. Unfortunately, I was wearing shorts and the corner of the cover gouged a 2.5" x
Though, it's a really cool looking scar; I won't tell anyone how I got it.
Re:wrong dir (Score:3, Interesting)
Boss: Sorry to wake you, but where's the source code?
Me: Uh, what, oh,
Boss: I'm in
Me: Do an ls and tell me what you see.
Boss: Dot and dot-dot.
--------------------
I had removed a mount point (/backup) for a failed disk where we mirrored the code. The dumb backup script did something like this:
cd
size=`du -s
cd
rm -rf this that the_other_thing
Fortunately, the tape backup had finished before the stuff was deleted.
*Spark!* (Score:2, Interesting)
My family's computer was extremely slow, and was a Packard Bell, which makes it even worse (it was a Pentium 133 in 1999). Ok, my brother's new computer parts he had finally ordered in the mail had finally arrived. After many years of using a computer way out of date, I finally got my brother's slightly out of date, but playable Pentium 200. I could finally play Half-Life, Unreal, and Quake 2 (at greater than 13 fps).
This thing was in a 386 AT case that housed two generations of motherboards before it (486-133 and 386DX-40) and had a power supply that was equally old.
After fiddling around the open case to fix a RAM issue, I powered it on and SPARK! One of the yellow wires on a 12V plug coming from the power supply had come loose and shorted right on the motherboard and burned a big hole through a chip.
Not much humility like having to move all your crap back to the old piece of crap computer (3dfx card, RAM, hard drive) after getting your hopes up to finally play those newfangled games you have been waiting to play for months/years.
Tossing a computer out a second story window... (Score:1, Interesting)
Okay, so it didn't happen to me, but to a customer at a computer store I worked at in the late '90's. He caught his wife chatting online with some strange man and picked up the computer and threw it through the *closed* window. It brought a whole new meaning to computer crash.
When I saw it, it looked like someone hit it with a sledgehammer then dragged it down the highway a bit. He brought it in to see if anything was salvageable, but other than the CPU (which appeared to have all its pins) it looked to be a total loss.
It may have been cheaper to have tossed the wife out the window and left the computer on the desk, but who knows?
SQL "Delete" Statement, without a "Where" clause (Score:5, Interesting)
"Delete From SomeTable Where SomeTable.SomeField > 500"
However, if simply you type:
"Delete From SomeTable"
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.
waterworks (Score:2, Interesting)
Needless to say I freaked. But, after drying everything off with fans and towels the only permanent damage appeared to by my UPS System. So I plugged everything back in and started it up, only My software RAID5 array was showing a missing disk, so I fiddled aroudn with it for a while and finally shut down and opened the case , only to find that one of hte hds was sitting face down in a pool of water
Re:mkswap (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:4, Interesting)
The mouse built a nest on the HDD to stay warm. The PS fan had sucked in some of the threads, feathers, grass, etc the mouse used for the nest. The PS smoked, I think the mouse panicked, and pissed on the NIC.
With all the mouse turds scattered across the motherboard, old hot HDD, toasted PS, and scorched NIC, I tossed the whole system. (And upgraded it to Windows 98! those were the days)
Not really accidents, but bad experiences (Score:3, Interesting)
This same machine also suffered my wrath one time when it was acting up or something. I kicked the side of the machine (it was standing upright) and it died. Would not boot back up. When I opened the case up, the CPU had popped out of the scoket and was laying on top of the video card.
I was tring to hook two old MFM drives up in another XT box once and didn't get the terminating resistor in the drive correctly. This caused a release of the magic smoke in one of the components on the drive itself.
One other thing that comes to mind...we had just gotten in an 18GB SCSI drive (a few years ago when this was a lot). It was in the anti-static bag. I went to pick the bag up by the open end. As I did, the drive went sliding right out the other open end of the bag (shipped that way even!) Made a nice thud as it hit the thin carpet covering the concrete floor.
And there was the time we were cleaning up and my boss pitched a box that looked like it was just full of packing peanuts. Turns out there were two 128MB sticks of RAM in there. Probably about $800+ at that time.
But other than that - no major "oh craps". Why do I suddenly expect to have something to post later tonight about this
Exploding Quantum hard drive (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway he had left the slot covers off the back of his computer so I suspect that is how the spiders got in in the first place. I would love to have seen them get closer to the processor so they could fry.
Ethernet Surge (Score:2, Interesting)
My Experiences (Score:2, Interesting)
2. Back in the mid 1990's I was working on a friends Windows computer and for some reason I thought He wanted to erase his drive so I did a "format c:". I knew from the expression on his that's NOT what he wanted, we still talk about that today.
Re:SQL "Delete" Statement, without a "Where" claus (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Umm, couldn't you just have said "rollback;" after your mistake? Or did you have auto-commit on?-)
Why I don't do Hard Drive backups anymore... (Score:2, Interesting)
Fortunately, I regularly backed up all my data to a second hard drive in the machine. I opened up the case, pulled out the backup drive to set the "MASTER" jumper, and booted the computer off of an old MS-DOS floppy disk. All of my data -- years worth of accounting data and a large desktop publishing project -- was still alive!
I disconnected the drive from the computer, and set it on the desk. I was planning to run up to CompUSA, buy a new hard drive, and reinstall the operating system and applications.
As I was rummaging around my desk looking for my car keys, I heard a loud clunk. I had just knocked my backup hard drive onto the concrete floor! I cringed, and this time when I hooked up the drive and booted the MS-DOS floppy, I was not so lucky.
I spent the next month re-entering accounting data and re-creating my project. It was by far the most disheartening way to lose all that data, and all that work.
I use tapes now. Sometimes I knock them off the counter, and they always work afterwards...
Re:mkswap (Score:2, Interesting)
# dd if=boot.img of=/dev/hda
instead of
# dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0
aiee!
PowerBook + SUV = not so good (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Girlfriend's Computer (Score:4, Interesting)
I backed up all her files onto a cd, and just to be sure I burned 2 extra copies of the cd. I reformat the computer and reinstall windows. I install the programs she needs, and I get one of the cd's to copy her work back on.
Nothing. I freak out. The system does not recognize the cd in the drive. I try another one. Same thing. Another. Same. I get really f'in worried, so I start searching online for data recovery. Meanwhile she doesn't know yet.
I put the cd into my linux box, thinking maybe that'll help. Nothing. Something had to have gone wrong during the burn process, and I stupidly didn't check to make sure they burned correctly.
After finding a program I could buy right there on the spot, I ordered it (you don't want to know the price) and started getting as much as I could, which wasn't much.
I ended up telling her, and she was very upset. Pretty much all her work that she didn't have on Zip disks was gone, which included 3d Work she'd done that took her months. I felt really horrible.
To this day she still jokes about it and I still feel bad. She had some awesome work that took her a whole lot of time. She's made a lot back up, and frankly the new stuff is even better.
I still felt like shit though. Now I make sure that all her files are backed up onto my desktop and my server. On top of that, I make a new cd for each quarter of both our work.
And yes, I check and make sure it burns correctly.
Taking down the net for a week in three easy steps (Score:2, Interesting)
One sunny day I took the whole net connection out for over a week.
Step 1 - Logged in as root, I did an rm
Step 2 - I called my buddy at Sun who then advised me how to rebuild the root partition, not realizing we had used non-standard formatting, so now the root partition was _really_ lost.
Step 3 - Proceeded to try and recover it from backup. At the time, we were using a backup script I had written just before going on vacation a few months earlier. It simply backed up the Sun box across the net to a VMS tape drive. I quickly discovered that the operator assigned to test my backup script had never done so (and I was on vacation), and to make it worse, some sort of timing issue introduced by the network transfer meant the Sun backup was basically unusable.
It took weeks to get another box and get it up and running again. Amazingly nobody gave me a hard time about it.
Re:SQL "Delete" Statement, without a "Where" claus (Score:3, Interesting)
Just let me think of some DB that is actually used somewhere
(If there is transactions in MySQL, I stand corrected, but they must have added the support just recently)
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Two disasters (Score:3, Interesting)
Second was a few years later. I was working on my home machine after having a couple of beers. I bumped the desk accidently and the rather large (22 oz) but empty bottle on the top of the hutch slowly wobbled and tipped over, did one very pretty twirl in slow motion, and bounced off the top of the computer case. The harddrive immediately began to emit an awful whining noise and the machine refused to reboot after this, courtesy of a classical head crash.
So that was my personal realization about the hazards of drinking around computers.
ninja iguana (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:gah (Score:3, Interesting)
So I just burned 33 CDs to be mailed out Tuesday. I go to play one in my CD player. The awful sound of data screeched across the room. I had burned 33 audio CDs with the ISO file I made instead of the CUE file.
I swear to God, this just happened, and I'm flipping out because I don't have enough CDs or a car to go get more CDs before Tuesday. Dammit.
Where to Begin... (Score:4, Interesting)
Having worked in the financial industry for a long time, I recall not-so-fondly some of my mistakes. The largest and most painful was probably the million dollar mistake. This occurred around the first year or so of working at a bank.
One of my tasks was to check out 'federal funds' balance at the federal reserve. We have to transfer money into the federal reserve account to keep it at a certain figure.
Well, reading the figures I thought it said we had over a million dollars of excess. This isn't unbelievable depending on the day or time of month, and I was told that since this balance was so high to transfer it to another institution. Off the money went.
Around 4:30PM or so we got a call from the Federal Reserve. "Do you know what your balance is?" They asked the CFO. Then they told him. Over 1.5 million in the negative. If we didn't have the money there by 5PM, we'd get charged $25,000.
This is about the time I get that oh-shit-I'm-gonna-be-sick feeling that happens each time I make a huge mistake.
We had to call another bank and beg them to reopen their wire transfer department so we could get the funds in there. I think they arrived at the fed somewhere in the 4:55PM range. Free screaming/chewing out for me that day!
The Car Accident
Not exactly computer related, but I did wreck the company car once. Ouch.
Oh, and did I mention I was probably the worst courier ever? I would burn through a set of tires, brand new Michelins, in about two months. They stopped asking me to courier after that.
Not after some more free screaming/chewing however.
The Video Card Zap
I once bought a Riva TNT 16MB back when they first came out. Around $300+ dollars so I could run Unreal with all the goodies on. And it was hot stuff. I was so proud of that damn video card.
So when I transferred it to a different PC just a few days after showing off, I bent over to pick it up...
And I saw the small blue spark jumt from my finger just as I was a half inch away. "Zzzt!" came the popping noise.
Can you say "Fuh-ried?" I know I could. Oh, the tears I wept for that one.
Permissions? What Permissions?
I once tried to implement a group-based permissions scheme on a little Win2k Server box. So when I right clicked on the C: drive, telling it to remove all permissions (as I thought I would simply assign them later), I thought it was odd to see the little pop-up box showing me each file as it removed all the permissions before it.
This is about the time that oh-so-sick feeling came over me. This was a box that the company relied on for big transactions and loans.
I tried to stop it, but it disappeared just as I realized what I had done. The permissions were gone for every user, and I mean everyone. I couldn't even SEE the permissions any longer. I didn't have permission to open any programs. IE. Explorer. I couldn't even see anything on the Start Button but "Shut Down".
Then the calls started coming in from users.
The boss said I looked like Casper.
Thank god for backups.
Re:The Worst. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've done that a few times, though with EISA cards. Somehow I've managed to get away with it every time so far, without even so much as a shock. If anyone's wondering why I would keep doing this, I have some exploded test fixtures for a product I support, and sometimes it's not so easy to tell if their on or not.
Now, this particular product has been in existence for about 10 years, in various incarnations. There's the old EISA-based version, which I support, and there's a newer PCI-based version, which is supported by another guy. Both versions have RS-422 cards that are made by the same manufacturer. Both are the same red color, and have almost exactly the same chips. The only difference is that one is EISA and on is PCI.
So, my boss (who definately does not have pointy hair) for some reason puts one of the PCI cards into my EISA fixture. Burned up the RS-422 card, the motherboard, and the CPU card, and I got to point and laugh at a man with a good 20 years of technical experience on me.
Upgrading to Win98 within days of release... (Score:2, Interesting)
110/220V (Score:2, Interesting)
Usual procedure was to set up the machines in the lab/training room to check the configuration before moving them to active duty (which had the added benefit that the occasional blown fuse would only affect the training room where usually nobody was working).
The real fun started when one day I set up a machine in the server room without checking the PSU setting. Of course, everythig in the server room is connected to a UPS, and the UPS kept supplying power to the poor PSU without even thinking about blowing a fuse...and supplying...and supplying...I noticed something was very wrong when the room started filling with blue smoke and molten plastic dripped from the machine's case. Always made sure to check every single PSU after that
Re:When I was in college and Linux was young... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) don't be too hasty using rm -rf
2) you must escape special characters like $
He actually killed the rm early on, so he didn't lose too much.
He felt kind of silly doing this, but then I explained what I once did. I was testing a kickstart script so I kept reformatting this machine. I decided to do a rm -rf / just to see what would happen. I did that Friday night and came back Monday morning. When I got in, everyone in our group was complaining that their home directories were missing. Then I relized my own lesson to be learned:
3) Always unmount the NFS directories before reformatting a computer.
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought a used Mac on eBay - $10 including monitor, and I thought that was a bit lucky. It arrived, and I understood why the description was "sold as is".
It'd not only been through a flood (silt and leaves all through) but had been used as a nest for mice for a good while. there was nesting material, mouse turds and pee all through the thing as well.
Thankfully, all this had happened while it was in storage
And now, I own a pet mouse [danamania.com]. One that's just kept right out of the insides of computers
I proved Dell's advertising is legit (Score:5, Interesting)
We got a brand new Dell 1750 Dual Xeon 1U server which was going to be our Novell R/W Replica & Login box. I put the versa rails in the rack, about 5ft off the ground. Now anybody who works with Dell's knows the new servers have these nubs on the sides which sit into slots on the extended rails - in other words instead of sliding the server INTO the rails like most servers, you have the rails already extended and set the server down ONTO the rails, into those slots. Then you slide everything into place.
Well, it was late - everybody was gone. But it was a 1U box - not TOO heavy (but heavy enough) So I hoisted it up and gently set the nubs into the slots - or so I thought. The right rear nub was not seated and it slipped out. The unit pivoted and our brand new 1750 went crashing into the floor below corner first!!!!! I can still picture it in slow motion as it hit the ground corner first, banged off the rack, and then slammed onto the floor.
Man talk about getting a sinking feeling in your stomach. The right rear corner was totally crumpled. In a panick I opened the case expecting to see a motherboard is a shattered corner.
Nope - the motherboard was fine. The power supplies had come out of their connectors - and slid right back in. The drives had come unseated due to the shock and had to be reseated. A couple hours later with pliers, ballpeen hammer, and other assorted tools, I managed to get the case corner bent back into what was close to normal. All the internals looked ok.
I booted up the system - nada. The 'Processor mismatch' LED was lit on the board. Ugh. Figured I'd cracked a CPU or worse. Then I noticed one of the heatsinks was ever so slightly higher than the other. I unhooked the retainers and found one of the processors had come OUT of the ZIF socket and was being held on top of the socket by the retaining clip. I could only imagine what the CPU had done to itself with its pins making intermittent contact with the socket below while power was on.
Well, after gently getting the CPU off the heatsink without cracking it (it was stuck to it by the heat paste), I reinserted the CPU, applied new paste, and reinstalled the heatsink.
Damn thing booted right up and has run without issue ever since - going on 6 months now. All diags, hard drives included, passed with flying colors.
Talk about dodging a bullet! Built Dell Tough!
Re:drop database (Score:3, Interesting)
$5 ? Was it even worth bothering to bring such a "succesful" site back up ?
Low level format of the wrong drive (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, as a drive installer I had the keystrokes to low level format drive C: so ingrained in my head that I selected the wrong drive and nuked their entire backup-less computer.
Needless to say, I learned the hard way that you should always do backups and disconnect drives that have valuable data.
Keyboard port (Score:3, Interesting)
It was a small jump (486 to 486DX, back when Intel had just announced the Pentium 3) but for me, that sucked.
My first Linux Accident, rodent accident followed (Score:1, Interesting)
The first Linux Accident, otherwise known as Understand Your Market's Thoughts And Desires.
Back when Linux was gaining steam, I mean when Linux was about to breakthrough to have the user and application and system support at good capability... An executive, at a small recently incorporated company was getting fed-up with Microsoft Windows 95 being unstable. Of'course, they used Dial-up 56 Kbps internet access, Outlook Express, Microsoft Office 97 Standard, and Internet Explorer; the typical primary applications you expect a Mom'n'Pop shop to run as they were referred from Radio Shack's Tandy computers and Fry's Electronics' used-car-salespeople. At their words of favor for my advice, I installed RedHat 5.2 Linux on an executive's computer thinking they will benefit from it. I showed the programs to use for the internet access, then a verry good graphical word-processor, and the eMail client packages. They just didn't want to use it. It seemed too foreign from their typical use of Microsoft Windows 95. RedHat 5.2 defaulted with the Feeble Virtual Window Manager (FVWM) and with certain themes it looked near duplicate to Microsoft Windows 95, but that isn't the point; stability and retained application features was the desire. It was no longer to their advantage as they didn't want to re-learn computing on a Linux-based platform. They purchase and I presumed command to install Microsoft Windows 98. For the time being, Microsoft Windows 98 improved the stability to a certain ammount of computer usage, and sufficed with still undesirable computer stability until purchasing Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition. After MS W 98 SE, they didn't upgrade for 4 years at the advent of Microsoft Windows XP. I must admit, Linux back in the year 1997 was verry good in all ways with exception to the Microsoft Windows users that wanted to translate to another platform; they just can't do it, Linux-based OSs simply don't have the comfort to "baby" them; they want Microsoft Windows, but not from Microsoft. Now today is a different world; Linux-based OSs are superior in every way to Microsoft with exception to proprietary hardware driver developers not providing drivers for Linux.
** ** **
The second Accident, otherwise known as Remember To Close All Motherboard Rear-Access Expansion Bays With Metal Plates.
I note a couple other administrators had the same problem. Rodents may look large, but that is mainly due to their fur making them look larger. I didn't close all the expansion bays on the rear of the computer and a rodent, a verry young mouse, climbed inside the chassis of the computer tower. It was an onsight typical computer job. The company closed its doors that day and the next day returned to a non-responsive computer. I looked inside and found the usual dead flies and crickets, then looked and saw a small spot on the PC66 SDRAM DIMM module. I noticed the spot because it had small lint hairs clinging to it, obviously because it was an adhesive liquid. It was a mouse's urine. Now, I carry no less than 30 spare computer metal plates and face plates so that any computer I approach to administer will have all its bays closed; this prevents all flies, larger crickets, and even the smallest of mice from entering.
Worst computer accident 1985 with a Vax and BSD (Score:1, Interesting)
Vax 11/780 with 4M of ram and a single
256M disk that took up the space of a
washing machine.
We had 15-25 graduate students on the machine
doing "distance education". It had never been
backed up in the 6 months we had been running it.
I decided, that prior to performing the first
backup, I would hack the kernel to add in support
for VMI's CP/M-80 Unibus co-processor card.
Numerous builds later, no joy. I decide to
rebuild the kernel one more time, and then have
the operators do the first backup [actually,
change the tapes].
Somehow I fubar'ed the last kernel and when I
rebooted it wiped the directory table. The inode
table was still good but fsck wasn't going to be
able to recover.
I spent 74 hours straight without sleep trying to
recover from that. I never did. It's a wonder
I didn't lose my job right then and there.
I bet they still have that disk pack lying around
waiting for someone to write a recovery program.
I'm sure the disk drive is long gone!
Lightning thru the cable modem. (Score:2, Interesting)
Only the machines that were on the wireless network, and miraclously one on ethernet, were spared. My poor BP6 was running in its motherboard box (because it was having problems grounding pins it shouldn't), it didn't fare well completely ungrounded. When I looked at the coax closest to the wall, there was no center pin, it had been vaoprized, and the inside was charred black. The inside of the wireless router was equally charred black, and the back of the upstream port was literally blown off!
Everything was on UPS's, even the TV and VCR on their own UPS (low rated, just for the clocks), but UPS's won't do you a lick of good if the surge doesn't come from the power lines. I learned that a surge protecter w/ coax or an in line DC blocker are a _MUST_ for cable modems! Trust me, watching god knows how many amps/volts tear across your network and destroy nearly everything in less than a second really sucks!
RoadKill (Score:2, Interesting)
While driving into town and taking a sharp curve I heard light crashing sound, and brushed it off as something from a passing car. However once I got into town and reached for my notebook I realized what I had done... and OHHH THE PAIN!!!
I raced back to where I heard the crashing sound (figuring that must have been where it fell off) I found a few scattered pieces (corner of the LCD, esc key, pcmcia cover etc). Someone must have picked up the bulk of it cuz, I never found it... I was hoping to recover the HD but to no avail
I formatted the company server (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, before I go any further, you should know that our Corporate IT folks had not yet acquired a backup tape system. In fact, it had arrived the day before, but had not yet been installed on the network. Also, the old Novell system chose which drive to boot on based on the name of the volume. If the name was "SYSTEM", it was the boot drive.
Well, our VAR had *already* formatted our drive and installed Novell on it. No particular reason, just thinking he would help out.
So, when we started the format, it formatted our old drive. The one with 6 months of development source on it.
It took us 3 months to recover. I thought I should have been fired.
The Moral: When working on a server, step 1 is *always* do a backup.
Re:Personal Injury via Rack Mount Case Cover (Score:3, Interesting)
I extended my desk by propping up a desk sized piece of wood on piles of computer magazine and got my wife to hold it, she lost her balance and fell on the section of casing (some of them are really sharp!) and cut her lip and foot open quite badly.
That would have to count as my worst computer accident.
Re:Honest (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem at Telewest (QWESTS UK arm) (Score:3, Interesting)
Worst Computer Accident. (Score:3, Interesting)
A Friend's truck had a bug in the ABS controller. There was a possibility for a sensor to get dirty. If the sensor got dirty, the controller would assume that, at low speeds, the truck was in a skid (or stopped?), and turn on the ABS - disabling the brakes! Yep, you heard me, the breaks failed OFF!
Of course, this caused him to have a low speed accident with some minor hood damage. He wasn't amused.
How's that for a "computer accident"?
Jason Pollock
I'm an OLD techie.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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TI 990. Installing a new drive, the old got wiped. No problem, we had a backup. Tape broke. Now I always make two. (the old backup was scotch taped back together, used a special hacked up program to skip the bad block on the tape. After 40 continuous hours due to the poor performance of the hack, all data restored, only skipped some system files easily restored from distribution media.)
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Installing a new process controler for an assembly line, the driver dropped it off the back of the truck when it got away from him on the four wheeled dolly. Completely trashed, as it dropped into the loading dock well, which was 3' deep in rainwater at the time...
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Working in the oil patch, a new computer was sent to an off shore drilling rig. The crane operator thought it would be funny to drop the pansy a$$ed techie types into the ocean. Loss of 1 techie type (quit), a $150,000 computer system, and one crane operator (fired). I think they were more upset about the guy quitting than the ruined computer.
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Put in new UPSs. Site was told to change the wiring for power to them, but they had not done so. No one checked. End result was 105 volts floating on the 5 volt buss. No major damage, since the 100 volts was floating, but it did act rather strange.... (The computer was a redundant hand built system in 5 7' relay racks.) It did cause a production hour outage, which made the customer really, really mad...
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AIX has a volume manager for the disks. When you add a bit of space here, and a bit there, after a while you can get an improvement in performance if you do a sysback, blow away all the disks, and do a restore - booting from tape. During a weekend of doing that, a tape got all balled up in the drive and broke. After obtaining a replacement tape drive (all hail 24x7 4 hour response hardware support contracts!) used the second tape (always made because of the first story from 23 years ago) to complete the process.
My poor Commodore 64 (Score:3, Interesting)
The mishap meant that I could no longer access my term papers, let alone the programs I'd developed. No one had a C64 anymore, so I was out of luck. For the rest of grades 11 and 12, I had to write papers by hand. BY HAND! And I stopped programming, since I had no outlet for my computer interests. Programming gave way to history, English, drama and other arts courses. At the end of grade 12, I convinced my parents that my graduation gift should be a contribution toward a Smith-Corona wordprocessor. The wordprocessor would at least allow me to save papers, and it was about 1/3 the price of an IBM. That Smith-Corona served me through 3rd year university, when I took 2 terms off and worked, so I could save enough for school, accommodation, and, thank goodness, a Packard Hell. But I'll never forget my Commodore and the infamous Paperclip wordprocessing program...or how losing the C64 led me to major in English, not comp sci. :)
Pre-Unix OS's and Circuit Breakers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:mkswap (Score:4, Interesting)
How about this..
On my workstation, I plugged in a hard drive destined to go into a server. My drive was
`fdisk
and I got interrupted. I [ctrl]-c out of it, and do what they need. I come back and again `fdisk
`mkfs
For some reason, because the partitions were still mounted on
That lasted for about 3 months. Then the power went out in the office. Dammit.
Re:The Worst. (Score:5, Interesting)
During my first job as a computer tech, we had a string of AT cases come through that had bad power switches. Unfortunately, we had sold these cases for about 2 months before the problem started showing itself with the switch. This ended up causing us to do a lot of 30 second switch replacements.
Anyway, one of the computers with the switch problem had come in with some unrelated software issues. I had just turned off the computer after looking at the problem and decided to replace the power switch while thinking some. So I pull out the needle-nose pliers and grab the first of the four cables plugged into the switch.
Quick lesson for those of you that didn't experience working with the AT standard. The power switch on an AT computer is hooked directly to the power supply and works like a light switch. Which means that when the power supply is plugged into a wall socket, power is always flowing to that switch.
Now note that I didn't say I unplugged the power cable from the wall.
I yank the first connection, no problem. I grab the second connection and pull it out. As I get it off, I feel this dull buzz in my finger. That dull "I've just touched electricity but I'm not grounded" buzz (which I had felt before due to an old crappy fan power cable). I let go of the connection with the pliers and step back a second, stunned. I then proceed to pull the third connecting wire out.
*sigh*
I unplug the connecting wire and let it go. A split second later there's this big *FLASH* and the power goes out in the workroom as the wire touches the side of the grounded case.
Somehow nothing was damaged in that computer...except for the giant burn mark on the insides of the case. And SOMEHOW, even though he was just in the next room over, my boss never said anything to me about it. I still doubt that he didn't hear it...maybe he was just laughing too hard to say anything.
I wish I had that case, now...would love to keep that burned carcass around to remind me of how stupid I get when I don't pay attention.
Stupid as a youth... (Score:3, Interesting)
So I was 19, with my first higher-powered desktop. Brand-spanking-new, only about a month old. It had been crashing a lot (courtesy of Windows ME - Thanks, Gateway!), so I was exploring options on how I could fix it on my own. I had already sent the tower back to Gateway multiple times and was just sick of them not actually getting it fixed. So, I thought maybe I'd buy some more memory and see if that helped.
Well, to this day I don't know what exactly went wrong. It might have been that I purchased the wrong size/shape/brand of memory, or it might be that I put it into the slot incorrectly. But as I booted up my system and saw the Windows ME splash screen come up, I heard a loud, thin whining sound. Then I smelled smoke. In a panic I whipped off the outer door of my casing only to see that the memory cards were smoking.
What's more, the pentium III chip was white hot. It was literally too bright to look at. The only reason it soon became okay to look at was because it caught fire. Yes, my motherboard caught fire. Then, as further evidence of my dumbass-ity, I realized that the system was still plugged in and making things worse. So I yanked the cord and watched as my memory and processor simmered down like a dead match.
Needless to say, the delusion I had held about myself being a computer genius was thoroughly shot. If there's ever a way to knock down a techie's ego, it's to have something catch fire and it be his fault entirely.
Re:um (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:mkswap (Score:3, Interesting)
The next time when re-installing Linux, however, I suddenly realized that I had just several times overwritten the whole data part of my drive C:.
The first thought was one of horror while a cold dread spread over me. All those years of collecting useful programs, making a complete DOS system, were gone...
After a few seconds, it was replaced by a warm, fulfilling sensation of happiness and freedom. I've never looked back...
(Fortunately, my own data was on drive D, and only the programs and OS were lost. Not that I've had much use for the data either, but it's a nice record of history.)
The dangerous tool that is called dd (Score:5, Interesting)
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/hda
when I meant to type
dd if=floppy.img of=/dev/fd0
And of course I was logged in as root because only root had raw access to the floppy.....
Ok, stop posting. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:2 hard drives, one power supply (Score:1, Interesting)
That is why I always have another spare computer in my wardrobe that is completley separated from the rest of the network. I only plug the power in when I want to have a backup, and it transfers the contents of my fileserver to itself (a nice 200GB disk). When finished, I remove the connectors and put it back into the wardrobe.
That keeps me safe of hard drive failures, power supply freakouts, flodding of the cellar and a _small_ fire, since it most probably only will hit one side of the house and take either the files or the backup.
Feels pretty good for me
Re:The dangerous tool that is called dd (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:3, Interesting)
Believe me, it's better that you can *see* the mouse as opposed to *smelling* the cooked mouse coming out the back of the machine (friend of mine who taught computing - this was in the computer lab).
On the subject of rodents, another friend of mine has a pet rabbit as part of her household. One day 'sniffy' escaped it's hutch and decided to gnaw through every cable going into the computer (barring the power cord, unfortunately). My friend was not amused. The rabbit was soundly kicked.
I tried destroying a computer... (Score:3, Interesting)
The short answer is nothing. Well, it didn't break anything.
We'd pull the ram with the power on and it would throw the system into a safe-mode where the screen would go black and the motherboard would cut power to everything. I looked into it and discovered that on a 72 pin SIMM, pin 1 connects to pin 72 to indicate that it has a good connection. Pull the SIMM and it will essentially switch off the power supply to protect all the system components. Same thing with the processor and any PCI/AGP/ISA cards.
It was kinda disappointing, actually.
Re:The little switch on the PSU... (Score:1, Interesting)
Another Story: MICE (Score:4, Interesting)
I went out of town for 3 weeks on vacation, some field mice got into our house while we were out. They found a nice warm place to set up a nest.... in my Polaroid SprintScan 4000 film scanner, which was pretty new and damn expensive at the time.
The SS4000 has a nice opening on the back where you can get in and out, and a nice warm area for building a small rodent residence... above the hole for the optical lens...
The SS4000 was thoroughly screwed up by this, and was filled with mouse poop to boot.
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The dangerous tool that is called dd (Score:5, Interesting)
rpmbuild -bb --build-root / specfile
Don't ever use the --build-root switch unless you really know what you are doing. The build-root directory is a temporary directory where the package will be built and installed before it is packaged up into an RPM. The first thing RPM does is to clear the build-root directory to make sure there are no files there that will interfere with the build process. Yes you guessed it, it does an rm -rf , or in this case rm-rf
Luckily there were backups of the data, but it still took them most of the night to get the system back up and running
A few bloopers I had (Score:3, Interesting)
Another time, I was changing a CMOS battery on a computer and pulled the metal clip that held the battery up a little too far. I put a new battery in and the piece broke off. CMOS couldn't be saved. Oops.
The most recent thing that happened was at school earlier this year. As part of our Capstone project we had several OS's including Windows 2000 with domain controllers. One of the disks containing a DC wouldn't work. Like the other hard drives, it was in a drive bay. I decided to take it out and hook it up directly to the IDE controller on a motherboard. Other machines in the room were having problems, so I took the disk to another room. A member of my group went with me. I hooked it up and spark! The disk caught on fire! He said,"Shit we got a fire!". I held the power button in and the system shut down and the fire was contained. Needless to say, I had lost part of the project. The workstation wasn't damaged, fortunately. But I'll never use a Seagates hard drive again. And to add insult to injury, someone stole our hard drive that had Linux on it and I already had Windows 2000 Server DC's, IIS, Novell 6, Windows 2000 workstations, and Linux with Samba already talking to each other! Doh! The icing on the cake was the instructor saying we had the smoothest OS install he's seen. Everything worked first time around!
Re:Honest (Score:3, Interesting)
$75K data center UPS = 2 lessons (Score:2, Interesting)
In a brand new data center, I was performing a regular bypass test on a somewhat large ($75K) APC UPS system. As I recall, I was switching the unit into bypass mode to prepare for a normal maintenance task. (Bypass mode is basically removing the unit from inline service. Instead of street->UPS->racks, you change it to street->racks.)
I followed the APC directions EXACTLY. Problem was, they left out one step. There was a large cradle switch that you pulled down to disengage the fuses before certain steps. Well, the documentation did NOT refer to a small metal plate that had apparently been added to later versions of this unit. I *think* the metal plate was suppossed to prevent an accidental disengagement of the fuses. In practice however, it did allow for a partial disengagement.
So, I pull the rocker switch down to what I think is disengaged, when in fact, it was only barely disengaged. I proceeded to the next steps...
BANG! POW! BANG! Followed by that charred electric smoke smell well known to most /.ers -though very strong in this case.
No fires, no blown batteries, but definately a charred distribution board and intelligence board(s). Fortunately, the entire unit was covered by APC support.
Two lessons learned: One, no matter how good the documentation is or isn't, experience with a specific device goes a long way. Two, always, always maintain support on expensive equipment.
I nuked 100,000+ PCs off internet & private LA (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem was that my optimization scheme did not take into account spanning tree's inability to incorporate the concept of in-between-cisco-devices to have non-Cisco ATM network devices (marconi).
It took 8 engineers in a conference call from one end of Canada to the next + Cisco in the USA + I forget how many managers & company directors, to after 3 hours of downtime to resolve the problem.
Oh did I mention the Telco lost a lot of credibility and had to issue over $20,000 worth of credits to various customers due to the massive downtime? So much for 5x9's reliability (99.999% uptime = 5 minutes per year)... I think I scored enough dowtime for about a century or so! hahaha
In my defence, let me just say that I witnessed fellow co-workers make even larger mistakes, like crashing a series of 5ESS switches & OC192 sonet boxes... Oh the joys & power of working for a telco! hehe.
Adeptus
Kool-Aid + Tower don't mix (Score:3, Interesting)
Later on, the computer seemed to work, but after about an hour, the monitor went black. My mom figured that the monitor got burnt out, since "the kool-aid landed on the monitor cords." I opened the tower to find Kool-Aid all over the motherboard. With a razor blade and some patience, I was able to remove the Kool-Aid from between the motherboard traces. Apparently, dried Kool-Aid is a decent conductor! I powered it back up and viola! The computer works.
Re:Worst computer accident? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Personal Injury via Rack Mount Case Cover (Score:1, Interesting)
(Apparently they managed to sew it back on and I have a renewed respect for wearing work boots around computer equipment.)
where are my files? (Score:1, Interesting)
Several years ago, a sysadmin (not me; developers didn't normally have root) decided that my Unix home directory needed to be moved from one file server to another.
I log in the next day, and start noticing problems. Such as most of my project files -- about 6 years' worth of sourcecode, archived email, development notes, documentation, and so on -- are missing. After some digging around I figure out who did it and give them a call to report the trouble.
I'm a bit pissed but not panicking, since ever since they switched from local ad-hoc admins to centralized system administration for those machines, they've been doing nightly backups of the file servers and home directories. So I say to them "well, I can probably remember and reconstruct what I did yesterday, so just pull my stuff off the last backup tape and I'll go from there".
There's a long pause on the other end of the phone. That's when I realized I really should be panicking.
See, it turns out they may have backups, but they've never figured out how to recover from the incrementals. So it might have to be the monthly backup instead.
Then later on they tell me that whoops, that server wasn't being backed up regularly yet.
Then still later they tell me that whoops, they don't seem to have any backups of my files. Ever.
So I got to spend the next several weeks (not like I had much else I could do) writing UFS forensics tools to undelete my own damn home directory off of an image of a "corporately supported" file server drive.
This was definitely the last time I trusted corporate support with my files. I think at one point I had five clones of my home directory on various physical drives and LANs throughout the organization, with regular rsyncs to keep them in sync with the working copy that was on a machine that I had total control over.
Occasionally when I'd do an rsync from my real copy to one of the clones on a "supported" file server I'd find it mysteriously fixing file attributes or repopulating large parts of my directory tree, and I'd know that some corporate sysadmin had fucked it up again somehow.
And a Vax-11 (Score:3, Interesting)
He then pushed the Vax (which was now on the rollable trolley) onto the liftgate on the back of his truck so he could lower it to the ground - it was about 3-4 feet off the ground. When he lowered the liftgate the little trolley started to roll and the Vax headed for the edge! He pressed the stop button but it still kept rolling. Knowing how much the Vax weighed I got out of the way but he jumped in front of it to try and stop it! Somehow he didn't get killed and it landed in the middle of Great Portland Street with an almighty crash.
After looking at it stunned, we tipped it back upright. It was all bent and bashed in and he remarked "its not too bad guv. we can just straighten it up a bit"! He even asked me if I'd sign for it. Needless to say at this point I made a hasty exit
Re:The dangerous tool that is called dd (Score:3, Interesting)
rm -rf
Of course it worked fine until a user somehow ended up with a space on the start of their home directory name, whereupon it did:
rm -rf
oops?
(I've seen the same script do "rm -rf
RAID failure AND backup problem + electrical outag (Score:3, Interesting)
One of them was completely gone, the other had a lot of damaged sectors and fsck'ed inodes. The PCI IDE RAID card was giving errors at kernel level, and a reboot was requird every time I tried to access the damaged sectors.
But the worst "luck" was that in the last week the backups weren't working correctly. Let me explain that backup policy:
- a DVD+/-RW writer with 4 DVD-RAMs
one for monday + wednesday
one for tuesday + thursday
one for friday
one for the last friday of the month
so, the accident happened on the last weekend of the month; and the backup was failing because I was just making a plain
Now, the backup failure was due to a file with a VERY long name, more than ISO+Joliet could handle.
It failed for the last week (I wasn't paid to check it every day.. not even to give them assistance) so it spoiled the
- "last friday" backup
- "tue + thu" backup
- "mon + wed" backup
- "friday" backup
basically we had NO backup, and a damaged raid.
Solution? This software helped us a lot:
http://www.stellarinfo.com/download.htm#anchor3
we mounted the less-damaged HD on a windows PC, and ran that software. It recovered everything smoothly.
I tried dd'ing the disk and fsck'ing but I got only a lot of sparse chunks (one per inode) of the recovered files.. and Word could not recover sparse files divided in chunks.
Lessons learned:
1) no matter if you're not paid, check your servers daily or at least set up a quick-and-dirty e-mail alert system
2) tar is your friend
3) a low-cost UPS is a bad choice
4) IDE PCI RAID adaptors don't convince me too much
Re:Mouse Pee (Score:3, Interesting)
The equipment is shipped in strong crates inside large containers. 3 months at see, 3 weeks dragged behind monster Caterpillars to reach the scientific station deep on the high Antarctic Plateau.
So when I get there months later, I start setting everything up. The HP laserjet printer comes up with weird LEDs lit up. Nonsensical messages on the LCD. None of it is in the manual. I try to troubleshoot by sending PCL commands direct to the printer port. Nonsense. Finally I open it up and find...
...the mummy of a tiny tiny mouse, droppings all over the inside, all the inner cables and some of the electronics eaten up... Must have been a long trip for one lonely mouse.
My Worst computer accident? (Score:1, Interesting)
Another time I took the only working copy of our OS disk out of the drive, was putting the bottom cover on it and it dropped out of the housing and with a spectacular crash hit the floor. The tape back-ups were of course corrupted, the back up copy didn't work......ahh the joys of bad system overview. We even had off site copies, none of which worked. We spent a month rebuilding the OS pack.
Had another user who spilled coke on a 15 inch tape that we then sent on up the chain.....needless to say the guys who ran the coke tainted tape where no thrilled!!!!!!!!
Had a guy hook up power to a system, only he did it backward. All the fans on the air conditioners ran backwards....LOL
Nuclear Test "Oops!" (Score:2, Interesting)
In an underground nuclear test, sensors are buried along with the device. A computer, located miles away, reads the sensors into core memory and then cuts its own power before the shockwave arrives. Later, technicians power-up the system and dump the data to tape for analysis. This works but has a high cost-per-test factor because of the long sensor cables running across the desert. Needless to say, between the nuclear explosion and the extreme shock suffered by much of the cable, the cables are pretty much "one use only."
An engineer decided they could save money by using much shorter cables, and mounting the computer trailers (think 18-wheelers) on telephone poles, steel cables and large springs near the blast site.
Unfortunately, when the "device" goes off, a wave-like effect ripples outward and the telephone poles were tilted away from each other, and then toward each other, and the trailer was first vaulted up 20' and then down 40' -- but was only 10' off the ground to begin with.
When they pried open the badly dented trailer, the computers inside were just so many "loose parts."
My collection (Score:2, Interesting)