Your biggest screwup?

[SagaciousKJB]

I think we've all probably had some phenomenal screw-ups ( at least I hopw it's not just me ), so let's share some.

Probably the one that made me feel worse, was one day when I was trying to delete a home folder that was within /home/ I thought I had typed

rm -R ./home/

But I had really typed

rm -R /home/

Luckily my movies were big enough files that they stopped it from deleting most of my "important" stuff.


Then I accidentally formatted my friend's FAT32 drive. I noticed right away and canceled, but I had to use 'dd' and 'hd' to reconstruct the file system. I learned more about FAT than I ever wanted to know.


Anyone have any screw-ups this bad?

[oz]

Had a hard drive that was connected to machine by cables but it was out of the machine and in my hand. Sat it down on the chassis for just a second and shorted it out.

That was about 8 years ago, so no more about that!

[elija]

I took down our biggest clients e-commerce server for 2 days at the busiest time of year. And I did it by applying a Windows "essential" update. That was a ****er of a weekend!

The funniest one I have seen wasn't done by me. An IBM engineer who had just upgraded our System 38 casually leant on the computer room wall. Right on the emergency power off button. It takes 24 - 48 hours to IMPL a System 38 when that button has been pushed.

The button was moved to over the exit

[Roxoff]

Public self-flaggelation isn't really my thing, but I suppose I need to admit this...


Once, right, a long time ago...



I... No, I cant say it...



















Hang on, must compose myself...
















Ok, lets start again...














Once, right...













Only once...




I...






installed windows. Damn, I've said it.

[bigtomrodney]

I installed a hacked version of Mac OS X onto my Dell laptop a few years back. It was onto my laptop and I was going to dual boot it with SUSE. The partitioner in OSX isn't as familiar a layout as I'm used from either Linux/Unix or Windows. It automatically selected some of my SUSE partitions so I tried to deselect them by choosing "Nothing" for those partitions. Unfortunately it took that as being quite literal and infact blanked that space, leaving it as an unformatted mess.

That destroyed some personal stuff that I hadn't yet backed up and I also lost some Video that took me a long time to get. I was livid but I just moved on and worked through it. Very occasionally I go looking for something though and discover it was on that drive and it's now gone forever. Well, on the positive side my backups are a lot more regular now and I have learned the ways of rsync as a result

[Freston]

My biggest screwup? Well, I once thought I had made a mistake, but I hadn't *bada boom*

Thank you very much

[techieMoe]

When I was in high school I had spent a lot of time playing with, taking apart, and repairing computers. I thought I was (for lack of a better term) hot sh*t. One of my teachers lent me an older computer of hers to look at and it came with this interesting little program I'd never heard of at the time called "Norton Disk Utilities." I think we can all see where this is going.

Needless to say, I completely borked the harddrive to the point that it would no longer boot. She didn't ask for my help again. Thankfully, 10 years and a Computer Science degree later I'm no longer NEARLY as dangerous with partitioners.

[dalinux_n00bie]

I haven't done anything major like erasing hard drives or bringing down whole server clusters, but I did punch my 15 inch LCD monitor because I was so P.O.'ed at Windoze. I moved to Linux and have been happy ever sense.

DISCLAMER: I really am not that violent, and it takes me a very very long time to get mad to the point of punching.

[TheAlmightyOS]

Well, lets see....

There was that time I accidentally changed the routers IP and knocked everyone offline.

OR

The time I spent an hour trying to get a blank hard drive to boot (grabbed the wrong one / thought it might be a mobo issue)

OR

The time I installed Norton on a 'Doze pc (it was the mid-90's and I was new to the whole pc thing)

OR

Just seconds ago when I accidently formated the wrong external >_<
All well, at least I have backups.... goodie, a whole day restoring 500gb of data

Anyway, take your pick. I am kinda a klutz and rush into things without double checking.

[sarlacii]

chmod'd the hard link to tmp in my home dir, having copied some files there. Was working as root (yes, now I know why they tell you not to do this casually). Man, removing the sticky bit stuffed up all sorts of things during boot... X doesn't load... took some time to figure the reason! LOL