Stupidest thing you have done on a computer?

RomanNose

RomanNose

RomanNose

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Last night I almost completely had to reinstall the os on one of my computers, luckily I managed to terminate the command before it did any damage but it was a close shave.

If anyone is interested , this was the command

Code: 
chown -Rv user:user /

In the past I have also formatted the wrong disks which has caused a few disasters.

So GD, what stupid things have you done on computers?
 
I've powered down an entire production system, by using an AS/400 command called pwrdwnsys *immed I think it cost the company something like 20k, since the entire UK based operations was down for over an hr.

I also managed to snap off the plastic protectors that hold in the SIM cards on a as/400 mobo. Being that everything including the RISC based CPU was molded onto the board, it was a very expensive mistake.
 
Marvt74 said:
For the non Linux users what on earth does that do?
Click to expand...

Quite simple actually.
In linux files have permissions assigned to them which controls what can be done to them. That command it changes the owner of the files to "user" and the group to "user" in the root file-system.
Usually all the files in the root filesystem belong to the user "root " and the group " root" and changing these to anything else will cause a lot of problems.
 
Last edited:
I set fire to the front panel of my old X-Fi soundcard by not lining up the connectors properly. Lots of smoke and it melted the whole cable. And that cable was sitting on top of the 24pin cable to the motherboard, so it melted a bit of that too :)
 
Code: 
chown -Rv user:user /
Starting at the root of the drive - /
recursively -R
change the ownership of any files chown
to user "user" and group "user"

the v I'd guess is verbose mode, but I didn't know chown had that option?

It's been 5 years :)
 
My friend managed to force a cheap molex connector upside down into my other friends brand new 500gb drive (back in the day when 500gb was big and expensive).

That didnt go down too well....

Personally, I think the worst that I have done is format the wrong drive after doing a data recovery on a suspect hard drive, luckily nothing important was lost. oops!
 
built a watercooled pc at work which leaked while doing an overnight test and ruined a GTX 590 and a Rampage III board which were then unreturnable. still maintain it wasnt my fault though!
 
Within my first year of using Linux...

Code: 
rm -r * ~/downloads

Luckily I'd backed up everything in my home directory, but it was still very embarrassing to do.
 
I've melted a USB port before (smoke was coming out).

Basically my rubbish pc is in my room and is next to a wardrobe, my memory stick was still in the front port, when I opened the door it hit the memory stick, bent it slightly.

The USB port no longer works but the memory stick does, even with a bent connection.
 
I was really messed up at the time but one time I rang a mate to ask him what the **** is going on I can't agree to the terms :mad:

*Mate*
Are you taking the **** ?

*Me*
Huh ?

*Mate*
Scroll down to the bottom of the page you ******* messed up ****. (Untold roaring of the laughter kind comes down the phone)

*Me*
:o
 
hmm, i cant comment on something stupid ive done on a pc.
But ive done something stupid with a pc.

years ago, when i was growing up, my mum had a pc that on the case, the slot for the floppy drive looked like a smiley mouth and the power / reset buttons looked like eyes.

I thought it may be thirsty, so i gave it a drink of water.

a while later, my mum plugged it in, just to get a booooom
 
Actually, thinking about it, I did once drop some pistachio nut shells into my CPU fan.
I knocked the bowl off the side of my bedside table, straight into my media PC, which at the time was on it's side with no pannel.

That made quite a good noise, and required the purchase of a new fan (which pretty much ripped itself to bits), but the PC lives on to this day, lol!
 
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