Post your worst computer messup (s) here!

Windows XP Home wanted me to install SP1, I did. Rebooted, Blue Screen of Death right before login screen. Tried to use Safe-mode, couldn't fix it. Tried to use the HP Recovery partition - it was corrupted. Went to boot into XP Professional - wouldn't connect to the internet.

Solution: Mandrake 10

So your worst computer mess up ever is installing Windows XP right?

i formatted a computer before backing up my quicken files

I had a powermac 7100. I picked up the keyboard and put it on my lap to type something. When I put it back down on the desk, the motherboard died, permanently. I took it to a repair shop they said the MB is fried. All I did is put the keyboard down on the desk.

That was my last mac.

Then apple pulled powercomputing's license and I don't think i'll buy another mac ever.

My worst copmuter messup resulted in my nickname. Not hard to see that I guess.

Anywho, I was sitting there one evening with computer guts and jumper leads splayed all over my lap when I accidentally applied to much current (way to much current) to a couple of circuits. Before I could find the cause of my problem (about 1.75 seconds) a couple of jumpers and wires had turned literally white hot.
As I jumped around trying to get hot melted plastic off my stomach my brother said "I don't know about your lunchbox, but you make a really mean toaster"
We laughed for hours, very fond memory.

Overwrote about 200 passwords in a database once (out of several thousand.) Just happened to be the accounting system for a large Fortune 500 company and it was payday. I had just moved another db onto same box and was transfering logins, but didn't stop to consider that there might be duplicate IDs in the system tables. Seemed like such a simple task I didn't give it much thought. Needless to say, I never made that mistake again.

I'm just gonna say it was with the winXP box just yesterday...... explorer crashed like a few times, windows itself crashed and restarted itself 1 time, explorer was taking up the CPU space for no reason and that needed to be restarted like 20 times!... and then after the pain it put me thru, for no good reason right after i made a post windows started printing everything i typed in upper case, so i put the caps on and that made it lower case (if that wasn't dumb enough) i could not get windows to type in periods or comas as it would instead use < and > , no mater what i did, so another restart and the problem was solved... then to top all that off i had to install a program and ended up restarted my computer at least 3 times (restart after you install, and i made a mistake so i uninstalled it and that required restart, then i reinstall, and another restart!!!!!!!)...

needless to say i was about ready to call up my bro , steal this computer, and and go target practice with this comp as the target (all the other computers up at the shooting rage are all blown up from too much bullets )

was running an update query to change 1 record that had been incorrectly entered, forgot the where clause and broke 2 fields in 174 rows. then spent 4 hours reconstructing the fields from .mysql_history and data in other tables.

It was when i accidentally changed XFree config and could not get it back to what it was and i was left without a gui in Redhat then really screwed things up trying to learn unix commands on the fly and could not get into root because i didnt write down the password, oops, then could not change to any other user. Had to format and reinstall.

As for windows. I could not get XP to install, Kept getting BSOD on install full home version after 3 days of pulling my hair out I took back XP full version and bought upgrade and tried to install that and same thing then found out that my Ram needed the volts upped a couple millivolts in the bios.

Three words: Windows Millenium Edition

ooowe,, don't remind us, i think we can all name at least 5 mess ups in that OS easily

My Windows-box once crashed everytime I pressed ctrl-alt-delete. That was - horrible...

Mine was windows XP. One day I reformatted my friend's hd and put win xp on it. It had both dial up modem and a network (ethernet) card. After the installation, it went through hadware detection and everything was done. But that stupid xp, I have no way to stop automatic hardware detection. It detects network card as a dial up modem and shows there are two dial up modems. It doesnt matter what I did, everytime it restarts, it still is a dial up modem. I opend up the computer again, removed both modem and network card. Installed just the network card without the modem on a different pci slot. I booted back to xp and reliezed floppy drive doesnt work. Opend it again, check the data cables took them off and put them back. It worked fine. Installed ithernet card and got it working. Now for the modem, I opend again. But didn't have enough space for the modem. So had to take out video card and move it 2 pci slots up. But when I pulled it, my hand accidently hit the sound card and some pins came off. Lucky it was an old computer, he didn't make me pay.

my worst mistake:

tried to install IPCop on a compaq deskpro. this compaq seems to need the compaq diagnose / setup partition, but IPCop deleted it (actually, IPCop asked me whether I wanted to lose all my partitions and I said "yes") so halfway the install, the HD couldn't be found anymore, tried to complete the install using my slack boot cd and copied the files manually, wich didn't work either, reset everything and switched the hd and cd to other IDE cables, but that didn't work because the good old compaq wasn't able to update his setup partition, so had to switch back :S tried to install slackware, wich came halfway installation and came up with an I/O error on the CD!?!? well, I started on that pc around 20:00 and I gave up at 5:15, was at home 5:45, slept 'till 6:30 and went to work

greetz,
-= iluvatar =-

btw: I've got another compaq wich has the same problem downloaded the setup discs last night but they give error: "can't install setup partition" so I'm really frustrated LOL