Computer Nightmares

[Jamesds]

I'm sure we all have a tale to tell about the time we did something that was either stupid, embarrasing, or encountered a rather frightening problem concerning a computer. What's your most memorable?

Once I got a real fright when I slid a red switch on my power-pack towards the 120 option. It was the voltage setting, and since the pc was plugged in and I live in the UK, there was a great blue flash as my powerpack got fried, and my pc wouldn't switch on - I was in tears, being only about 10 years of age at the time.

I have done some stupid things like deleting files I shouldn't have which stopped Windows from loading properly and required a backup be performed in DOS (which truncated all your file names to eight characters, with the last 2 a ~2, ~3 etc for files with same first characters ) and a format and reinstall of Windows.

I know that I've also encountered several more of these situations (not all of them my fault ), but I fail to remember them all now .

 

[Macha]

I went and opened the computer and unscrewed a hard drive with a magnetic screwdriver. (60% of the files wouldn't open afterwards, I was lucky it still worked.

 

[Phlegmak]

I deleted about 4 years of work. It was a game I worked on. Nice, eh?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

At work on my birthday I accidentally reformatted a disk to act as a CD-ROM emulator not realising it would delete all the data that was on it. Oh well, go to the pub at lunchtime and sort it out the next day.

 

[Quintillus]

Once my cat deleted a partition of my hard drive. It completely disappeared from what Windows could see. Fortunately Partition Magic restored it with only the files on that partition lost, and the rest of the hard drive intact.

 

[ggganz]

Your cat? Well, my cat sometimes rubs her head on my mom's hand when it is on the mouse, causing the window to close.

I have...
Set my monitor's refresh rate too high (the manual clearly illustrated it's limits). Now the BSOD/OEM Logo and the Windows loading screen thingie don't come up.
Deleted system files causing me to need to reload windows (somehow left all the files alone).
Deactivated my original video component (I have a video card installed in another slot now) and, for some reason, even thought there was nothing in the old one before, after I deactivated it, it did show something: a totally screwed up image, which was slightly less screwed up than the new card's picture, and I had to switch my monitor between them several times to fix it.
Held a magnet up to my monitor.

 

[Kan' Sharuminar]

I accidentally reformatted my entire computer (one of my much older ones) when I was just trying to fix my modem. That was quite a shock, I'll tell you. I was intending on reformatting it soon, just would have liked to have gotten half my files off it first.

 

[Junglecutter]

I was upgrading my pentium 2 processor to a then expensive pentium 3 but did not bother changing mother boards thus destroying the processor

 

[Shadylookin]

used a windows ME

deleted my windows partition trying to install FreeBSD unix.

was forced to use BSD's command line because i didn't know how to start the gui.

didn't know linux distos came with package managers so I kept trying to compile things from scratch with little success.

broke a processor because I didn't know you have to lift the lever on the motherboard.

used a windows ME(I know I already said it but I think it bears repeating)