Your biggest IT disaster.

[beaker15]

What was your biggest IT disaster or computer repair failure....

[Security]

Surprisingly I have never had one, I guess I have my shit together enough to prevent creating one.

[beaker15]

Just now, Security said:

Surprisingly I have never had one, I guess I have my shit together enough to prevent creating one.

Dang.... Pretty good. My worst was probably screwing up a BIOS flash.

[Security]

That is the type of war story I never had, even tho I remember having to flash a bios from a floppy and the early days when you could do it in Windows XP for the first time (which was rather buggy)...

[obsidian1200]

I don't think I'd call it a disaster. I recently upgraded my server and in the process reinstalled Windows Server 2012 since I changed mobo and hw configuration, and when I imported my storage pools, I saw the data but couldn't access the files. Creating new files were accessible, but not the pre-existing files. Google was no help, and I was at a loss. The critical data had been backed up, but all the media I use for plex wasn't (I had the disks, but I'd have to re-rip). I was ready to give up, format the pools, and start reripping my media collection. 

 

Then I remembered I hadn't finished reconfiguring my server roles and features to match my previous configuration prior to the OS reinstall. Turns out all I needed to re-enable was data deduplication feature. Everything has been fine since I did that. It was a good learning experience, but still a bit stressful.

[Coaxialgamer]

Breaking pins on the back of my 3770k.  Had to use solder,  and even then dual channel wouldn't work. 

[Jbax1899]

I electrocuted myself once at a networking class. We were helping another class set up computers and link them together, and while I was trying to plug something in at an odd angle my hand slipped and I touched the prongs. With as much power as was running through that loop I should be dead. But no, just a small tingle. Of course I did still jump back a mile.

[spellmanuk]

when moving house once i dropped my PC when trying to get it into my car, everything was fine except the 980ti that snapped its pcie pins and back plate off  and obviously evga weren't going to replace that so now im stuck with a 950 

[Just Monika]

A couple of weeks ago, 2 of 3 partitions on my 2TB HDD completely lost their data for some unexplained reason, these two partitions contained all of my personal files (documents, pictures, etc). Fortunately I was able to restore the vast majority of the files using Recuva and I was back up and running after a day. I still haven't figured out the cause of the data loss, there was no sign of any virus/trojan/etc.

[KuJoe]

Me personally, I can't think of one off hand but I'm sure I made my share of mistakes. We had an HP engineer on site to help setup a new system that was brand new and no other company had access to yet (at the time the only use the system had seen was powering HP's website), he plugged it into the wrong network port and had it misconfigured so it brought down 2 data centers totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in damages during the 3+ hours they were offline (and he never told anybody he did it so it took hours for somebody to figure it out since we weren't even sure which data center the problem was occurring in). A lot of people got fired that day.

[Ryaou]

Not a disaster but it's kinda emabarissing, during an internship I was formatting an office computer's HDD using a software on a live usb, and accidentally cleared the data on the usb drive... oops, apparently there wasn't a spare available

[Macko939]

15 hours ago, beaker15 said:

What was your biggest IT disaster or computer repair failure....

I recently found out that you have to use mobo standoffs... I thought these were just random spare parts or something.

I've been using my PC for like 6 months now and its working like gold. 

This thing is still bugging me but I don't even know if its worth stripping apart my entire pc if its already working fine... I've put a lot of effort into cable management and stuff.

[Unhelpful]

15 hours ago, Security said:

Surprisingly I have never had one, I guess I have my shit together enough to prevent creating one.

Nope. No matter how good you are it happens eventually.

[RuffRuffmcgruff]

First day of my very first IT job in a laptop repair shop, there used to be a pile of laptops to be repaired in this sort of book case type shelf thing anyway, I accidentally ran into it and all the laptops fell off their shelves. I spent the rest of the day sorting through them seeing which ones where still alive. None where about 30+ laptops all broken, the worst thing was that the boss was out for the afternoon so I had to wait for him to get back and explain what happened. So many times I contemplated running out the door but I decided to stay. I wasn't fired but had to explain to each of the owners what had happened which sucked. Anyway I thought I got off pretty lightly with what happened. 

[Security]

5 hours ago, JoeyDM said:

Nope. No matter how good you are it happens eventually.

I know it will at some point, just lucky enough it hasn't happened yet.

[Blucyrik]

I was trying to update the BIOS on my mom's computer.

 

Long story short, $150 down the drain

[beaker15]

On 2/25/2016 at 6:15 AM, Macko939 said:

I recently found out that you have to use mobo standoffs... I thought these were just random spare parts or something.

I've been using my PC for like 6 months now and its working like gold. 

This thing is still bugging me but I don't even know if its worth stripping apart my entire pc if its already working fine... I've put a lot of effort into cable management and stuff.

I'd be careful though, Some cases dont need standoffs but most do. I had a friend short out his new pc because of that. only the gpu survived...

[beaker15]

On 2/25/2016 at 6:19 AM, JoeyDM said:

Nope. No matter how good you are it happens eventually.

True... soooo true

[Tmt97]

On 2/24/2016 at 1:32 PM, beaker15 said:

What was your biggest IT disaster or computer repair failure....

I bought an AMD CPU. Second biggest was probably when I installed windows.

[beaker15]

Just now, Tmt97 said:

I bought an AMD CPU.

I bet that burned..... YOUR HOUSE DOWN with all the heat! Lol

[Tmt97]

Just now, beaker15 said:

I bet that burned..... YOUR HOUSE DOWN with all the heat! Lol

Actually I've been able to keep it surprisingly cool even with the stock cooler, the performance is just shit...

[beaker15]

3 minutes ago, Tmt97 said:

Actually I've been able to keep it surprisingly cool even with the stock cooler, the performance is just shit...

What CPU was it?

[flibberdipper]

I honestly still have no idea how it happened (restarting DOZENS of times fixed it), but just recently I had my storage and scratch drives dropping out of Windows and I could not figure out for the life of me why. Sad part is that if they had corrupted, nothing was backed up, and nothing is backed up STILL since I don't have a quad-pair of 1TB or 2TB HDDs to back up on (running them in pairs of course for redundancy).

[Tmt97]

1 hour ago, beaker15 said:

What CPU was it?

fx-6300. I pushed it to the limit too, and it wasn't that bad. Might just be my particular cpu though, I was told by other owners of fx-6300 that with the stock cooler I was running a few degrees below the temperature theirs ran at in the same conditions.

[Thiback]

Back when I was 11, I unplugged the shiny new 8800GT of my then 21yrs old brother computer during his absence, just to observe it, and disassemble it. When I put back the card in, I had forgotten to plug back the fan header of the card. When my brother came back without knowing I had touched his PC, he turned it on, and played Battlefield 2. Within minutes later, artifacts showed up on screen, and the GPU was dead. Needless to say I got rekt by my brother when he learned that it was me who had inadvertedly destroyed his graphic card.