Worst Computer Disaster You Have Caused or Experienced

a_unique_person

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a_unique_person
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I have a whole swag, but I would rather hear your's first, before I embarres myself.

A minor one, I had a mother board, that was playing up, so I tried to replace the RAM to see if that was the problem. It was hard to reach around in the nook the computer was in, so I just jammed it in as best I could. Unfortunately, it was upside down. The moment I turned it on, I smelt that unique aroma that only a fried electronic component can make.

Scratch one motherboard.
 
I've detailed my own recent problem with wiping out my hard drive elsewhere. However, the worst work-related error was typing M-ACCT instead of M-ACCOUNT in a COBOL program (both were legitimate fields, but stats were only collected from one). Not discovered until six months later when the stats for the project were collected. Of course no backups had been made of the original data (that part was not my fault). This started a whole line of unfortunate incidents that ultimately led to another job that worked out quite well.
 
a_unique_person said:
before I embarres myself.
Click to expand...
Too late ;)

My worst was also my dumbest. Was working on my computer's innards WITHOUT turning off the power. duh. A screw touched the wrong thing and *zap* no more PC.

Never messed up anything at work much....although ironically the one time I TRIED to mess up a computer (at college) it didn't work. This was back in the days of old clunky mainframes and punch cards.....had a project that wasn't about to make it in on time and went into the "computer room" (old farts know what I mean) and immediately zeroed in on a panel that said DO NOT TOUCH and threw every switch/button I could.

Didn't work. :(
 
a_unique_person said:
The moment I turned it on, I smelt that unique aroma that only a fried electronic component can make.

Scratch one motherboard.
Click to expand...

I see, you let the magical black smoke out of the computer (it won't work without it).

LLH
 
the CD drive vanishes

Still not sure how this happened, but one fine day my CD drive just vanished from "My Computer" ----

How did this occur? Who knows. I ultimately discovered (after hours and hours of software- and hardware-related troubleshooting) that it was the result of 32-Bit addressing being turned off. Mysterious and frustrating to solve. (I actually replaced the CD drive at one point, although the replacement also failed to appear, naturally).


  • START / SETTINGS / CONTROL PANEL / SYSTEM / PERFORMANCE (tab) / ADVANCED SETTINGS - File System (button) / Troubleshooting (tab) / Settings

    This checkbox had been selected: (5th from top)
    "Disable all 32-bit protected mode disk drivers"

(It just needed to be unchecked to solve the problem and voila -- my CD was right there where it should be)

Go figure...

[[[[ edited to add: ]]]] I ultimately arrived at this solution, after discovering that my drives were in MS_DOS Compatibility Mode and this led me to the above path.
Here is the article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q130179/
 
Being 13 years old, I started to look at the amateur hardware kits avalaible for my c64. I decided to start with a simple reset button, as it looked easy to do. Theorically, a reset button would be a good thing for the life of the machine, instead of using the normal on/off switch.
I burned the poor beast.

About 8 years ago I also burned a cdrom and a hard disk at the same time, I soldered the power cables wrongly. Not a big drama, both components were low quality and old.

However the burned c64 felt very very bad in the moment. :D
 
Re: the CD drive vanishes

webfusion said:
Still not sure how this happened, but one fine day my CD drive just vanished from "My Computer" ----

How did this occur? Who knows. I ultimately discovered (after hours and hours of software- and hardware-related troubleshooting) that it was the result of 32-Bit addressing being turned off. Mysterious and frustrating to solve. (I actually replaced the CD drive at one point, although the replacement also failed to appear, naturally).


  • START / SETTINGS / CONTROL PANEL / SYSTEM / PERFORMANCE (tab) / ADVANCED SETTINGS - File System (button) / Troubleshooting (tab) / Settings

    This checkbox had been selected: (5th from top)
    "Disable all 32-bit protected mode disk drivers"

(It just needed to be unchecked to solve the problem and voila -- my CD was right there where it should be)

Go figure...

[[[[ edited to add: ]]]] I ultimately arrived at this solution, after discovering that my drives were in MS_DOS Compatibility Mode and this led me to the above path.
Here is the article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q130179/
Click to expand...
I have this unsettling and eerie feeling I may need this someday. :saved:
 
This was a near disaster. I am a mainframe computer programmer. I have been rung up and asked ‘what the … am I doing?’ The machine was about to crash within minutes and it would be because of what I was doing. Fixing it would take 30 minutes or so. This would mean that thousands of people would stop work. Many of them would be talking to people outside of the organisation. Cost to the organisation of thousands of dollars and loss of reputation.

That was one of my minor errors. Have caused my organisation embarrassment several times because of errors. Like the time I sent out thousands of letters saying you are no longer one of our clients. However they never were. All I had done was use the wrong variable in a program. Took several weeks to fix.
 
rjh01 said:
This was a near disaster. I am a mainframe computer programmer. I have been rung up and asked ‘what the … am I doing?’ The machine was about to crash within minutes and it would be because of what I was doing. Fixing it would take 30 minutes or so. This would mean that thousands of people would stop work. Many of them would be talking to people outside of the organisation. Cost to the organisation of thousands of dollars and loss of reputation.

That was one of my minor errors. Have caused my organisation embarrassment several times because of errors. Like the time I sent out thousands of letters saying you are no longer one of our clients. However they never were. All I had done was use the wrong variable in a program. Took several weeks to fix.
Click to expand...

I used to do that sort of thing all the time. The issue is not how good are you, but how good are you compared to everyone else. Then it's not so bad, most of the programmers I worked with weren't that bright either.
 
Sort of computer related - people who have worked in "computer rooms" with the bigger machinery will appreciate this.

About ten years ago, the company was upgrading the fire suppression system (out with Halon, in with some non-CFC stuff or other) that cost some hundreds of thousands of dollars, including about $10,000 in new gas alone. The installing technician has the whole system wired through an automated trip connected to the fire-detectors, and also a manual "Panic Button" (manual trip). To test this system, they usually disable the gas-firing circuit so that only the alarm is sounded, and the fire-brigade alert is set off. All well and good.

Comes the day of the instruction for the building supervisors and in-house staff. The head supervisor is a dapper and professional little lady who affects short-skirt, long-jacket and rather bouffant hair styles held up with much hair-spray. Everyone is standing in the computer room, and the techie hits a fire-detector with a cigarette lighter. Many red lights and sirens, the fire-brigade call to say they confirm the alert, the system is pronounced good. Everyone smiles and breathes easy.

Then the techie casually demonstrates the manual trip...which he had forgotten was on a DIFFERENT CIRCUIT from the detectors, and had NOT been disabled...

$10,000 worth of gas pours into the room from the overhead nozzles in about 10 seconds with a sound like being underneath Niagara Falls, and just about as gently. The bouffant hairdo gets blown straight down like a limp mop, the suit is ruined. Everyone makes a rapid and highly undignified exit... VERY grim looks at a very red techie.

Next month, all the discharge nozzles are DISCONNECTED before testing is done!
 
Here's a good one from just today:

Some guy decided to cool his datacentre by wrapping the racks in plastic and pointing a couple of domestic air conditioners at it. Apparently this made the racks run a little cooler.

But then, he posted a story about it on Slashdot and BANG, the you-beaut plastic datacentre goes off the air.
 
I remember when I was looking after a rack-full of HPUX servers that were running a huge Oracle database. I had to come in one Sunday to do a memory upgrade on 2 of the servers and had scheduled some down time with the database administrator (who was in London - I was in Belfast) to do this.

I wasn't happy about working a Sunday and was more than a bit hung over at the time.

I rang the DBA to confirm that all the users had exited the system. He said to give him another 30 mins and then go ahead. Or something like that, I wasn't really listening.

I waited 30 mins and shut down the servers. I then got a phone call from a confused DBA, wondering what had happened to his servers.

"I shut down after 30 mins, like you said."

"I said to ring me back after 30 mins, you (*£&*"&$^!"

He still had nearly 1000 users attached to the system.

Still, it only took a 6 hour restore from tape to get things back in shape. Don't know what the guy was ticked off about.
 
I wouldn't have believed this if I hadn't done it with my own fingers: I was removing some .bak files with "rm *.bak" without realising that the . key was a bit sticky.

I was briefly puzzled when the OS reported "rm: bak: A file or directory in the path name does not exist."

A quick trip down to the computer room to mount some backup tapes, then.

I've been lucky. I've never had a disaster that I couldn't recover from, not one involving customers anyway. I've had a few showstoppers with my own stuff, but that doesn't seem to rank with that sudden numbing feeling you get when you've just done something really stupid to someone else's multi-million pound machine.

I suppose the worst one was when a government organisation sent out fines based on calculations done by weight, using a report I'd written for them. (It was calculating fish landings vs. a particular trawler's quota) It was only after the first irate phone call came in from one of their clients that they realised the report was producing weights in pounds, and they were expecting them in stones. Oops!

(Mind you, couldn't the daft buggers read? When a report says "421 lbs" and you cheerfully read it as "421 stone" and fine accordingly you deserve all the brickbats you get).
 
richardm said:


I've been lucky. I've never had a disaster that I couldn't recover from, not one involving customers anyway. I've had a few showstoppers with my own stuff, but that doesn't seem to rank with that sudden numbing feeling you get when you've just done something really stupid to someone else's multi-million pound machine.
Click to expand...

Ooooh, flashbacks, that 'numbing feeling'. The more million dollars it is worth, more numbing.
 
Peskanov said:
Being 13 years old, I started to look at the amateur hardware kits avalaible for my c64. I decided to start with a simple reset button, as it looked easy to do. Theorically, a reset button would be a good thing for the life of the machine, instead of using the normal on/off switch.
I burned the poor beast.

About 8 years ago I also burned a cdrom and a hard disk at the same time, I soldered the power cables wrongly. Not a big drama, both components were low quality and old.

However the burned c64 felt very very bad in the moment. :D
Click to expand...

You were supposed to put your reset switch in a cartridge so if you messed it up you would fry the cartridge, not the 64 itself. To bad I couldn't give you this tip 2 decades ago!

LLH
 
Does a data entry error count?

Not mine here, but a colleague mistook MWh (of gas) for therms on our online trading system and bought £17,000 of gas for the less-than-bargain price of £524,000.

Company was obliged to pay for it too.
 
a_unique_person said:
I have a whole swag, but I would rather hear your's first, before I embarres myself.
Click to expand...

There are a couple. One is when the disk controller on the Plato system went bad, and it was the same controller that did the tape backups. A couple of years' work was lost.

Another was a redundant disk on a Sun enterprise server. When the replacement disk was inserted, it copied the (blank) disk onto the normal disk.
 
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