Have u made any big mistake?

[Stead]

my worst thing (that i'll admit to) i was sorting out my sisters old pc, decided instead of installing sp2 i'll just make a quick nlited cd with everything slipstreamd, figured it would be quicker, now i thought, it would be so much easier to keep the files and settings using ms's files and settings transfer wizard, so i thought, why not, its easy, its xp, i'm putting xp back on, what sthe problem?

so anyways several hours later with my nlited xp2 cd, installed it all up, felt quicker than ever! and then i simply run the files and settings wizard to restore files and, oh, what, files were saved using an earlier version of windows? what? was xp, now xp? what?!?! to my shock pre sp2 settings and files are not compatable with sp2 wizard, ... tried looking on the net, found the tools to extract the files from the archive thing it makes, none worked! not even the ms ones, luckily the other month when i tried vista, vista's migration wizard let me restore the files! although it warned me that the files and settings were from a 'very old' version of windows, and would only let me extract the files and not restore settings (which was fine by me!)

for 8 months i had this 1.3 gig recovery file which i couldn't open! sister wasn't to impressed...ah well, all back now, thank god for vista hehe

[sylvianorth]

My sister would have buried me if I did that to her!

[awergh]

if you must know the mistake i didnt admit.

i have an nt4 server and i have policies, so one day i made\edited the nt policy and managed to inflict the policy on the administrator acount which meant i couldnt logon and change the policy but than i resinstalled nt but made the mistake again, so i had to reinstall it again and now i have a ghost image.

but recently i made another mistake (no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) anyway i was in a very linuxish mood so i ended up atempting to install ubuntu lite 1.1 as usuall i didnt pay much attention to the messages. but i tried to install anyway, i found that the cd was dodgy so i restarted and found out it had repartioned my c drive (NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

so i install windows i decide lets try 98se2me, and the sound card drivers so i install these files in it from this thing on drivers guide, restart

you need to upgrade to dos 8 (NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

reinstall windows again and it keeps installing hard ware like com ports and stuff (huh ?????) anyway i install the network card and the sound card

restart

logon

BSOD vxds (NO!!!!!!!!!!!)

reinstall again

now i havent installed the soundcard yet

created a ghost image

[bledd]

forgot to add sata drivers to my nlite cd, then when i was installing it on my live system, i had my backup usb drive plugged in, was on the phone to my girlfriend when the partitioning screen came up, i just saw one drive there and thought 'there's my os drive', remove paritions

then i created the new partition and realised the size was not the size of my main drive!

luckily, i stopped there and made no other changes to the drive, then i used testdisk partition recovery tool to rewrite the parition tables, took about 5 seconds to fix and get all the info 100% back as it was, then i gave a big donation to the maker!!

[#rootworm]

once upon a time i installed Windows ME. that was a pretty bad mistake.

also, a while back i was reinstalling Mac OSX 10.4.3, and decided to use the Mac partitioning utility. bad bad mistake. it totally fubared my partitions to the extent that not even fixing the partition table did anything.

i've also had linux distros create some screwed up partitions from the installer. (though at least with these i don't think i ever lost data)

now i never ever use random partitioning utilities and always create my partitions before installation with a utility i trust.

edit:

wow bledd, that testdisk utility is a gem, thanks for mentioning it!

Edited November 12, 2006 by #rootworm

[zeko]

a local radio station called me to fix their pc. they were my old clients. but this time i picked a wrong boot cd with me. it was made to automatically format complete drive and install nlited xpsp2. when i put the cd it booted and started its job. when i realized what was happening before my eyes i completely froze. then i quickly ctrl+alt+delete but it was way too late. then i had to call the manager and lie about their faulty hardware. in the end i had to setup the pc from scratch, but i was paid really goood. thats luck i guess.

sure, i felt guilty, but what could i do?

Edited November 12, 2006 by zeko

[Doenja]

What about changing your harddisk, backing up ofcourse the most importend items like documentfolder etc to a Rw/DVD and after that was done erasing the dvd in the proces off making a multibootDVD. I forgot to take out the disk from the writer Ending up with 3 gig of no data at all Ofcourse the old harddisk was already on his way to the compugraveyard.

Who said that backing up was a good practice??

Doenja

Edited November 12, 2006 by Doenja

[Noggin]

okay, I'm only 13, so I haven't been alive long enough to make any major problems...

apart from one...

I think this is probably the worst of all the problems posted here!

well, it all started on monday morning, monday the 13th to be exact.

I always hated mondays...

anyway, I went to school and some of the teachers were a bit late.

Out teacher/tutor was one of them.

I asked her what was up, and she said that some of the computers had had some problems.

(The teachers use computers to sort out their lessons).

So, I asked If I could have a look (I'm quite good with fixing our school's particular computers).

A few hours later, I had got to the bottom of it.

A student had used his computer account to download viruses from all over the net!

(trojans, malware, cracks etc...)

so I set the antivirus software on his account, and it got rid of all the viruses.

Or so I thought...

A few minutes later, the head teacher got an alert saying that his version of windows XP was faulty.

He came in waving the message about and was...

quite miffed...

As the head teacher's windows is the host for all of the computers.

So NONE of the computers could work.

Everyone (including me) was furious.

So I used our ICT teacher's laptop to re-validate the head teacher's windows, but it didn't work.

So every computer was down.

Then it hit me.

While the antivirus software was deleting all the viruses, it had deleted some (infected) essential system files, including shell32.dll, explorer.exe and msprof5.exe

I thought:

"Oh, boogers".

So the school had to pay for a maintenance guy to come out and fix ALLLLLL of the computers.

In the end I think it cost something like £21,500...

at least the guy downloading viruses was excluded

-Noggin

Edited November 19, 2006 by Noggin

[flyingfiddler]

I make mistakes daily, but I learn from them...

Computer related: Back in the Windows 3.1 days when we used an IBM 8086 at home I wanted to free up some room for some games so I deleted *.* in the C:\Windows\System folder... what are those DLL things and why are they wasting space I thought This was also my Dad's work PC at the time... I was in the dog house for a bit.

Aviation related: I was taking my girlfriend up (now my wife!) for a flight and couldn't seem to taxi the plane... it seemed some how stuck on something. I powered the plane off, got out and checked around for debris or anything that was making us 'stick'. It turned out the parking brake was on... oops! The main thing is I still fly and she married me

Failing forward... definitely a good thing to do!

Regards,

Dan

[glocK_94]

So the school had to pay for a maintenance guy to come out and fix ALLLLLL of the computers.

In the end I think it cost something like £21,500...

Whow! That IS bad...

My mistake? I pluged a USB front port the wrong way in a Mobo... That killed the flash drive I inserted a few minutes later...

[Jaqie Fox]

The first time I ran linux, when I was a total noob at it. I logged in remotely to my dialup ISP which ran BSD on their server. Their setup was very insecure and stupid - which was a good deal of the problem.

I did not realize I was still logged into their machine instead of mine... I decided to have some fun before I reformatted and installed DOS again on my machine so I did a

rm -R *

I watched for a while... then saw it deleting account directories of people I knew in town... I could not stop it in time, as soon as I realized, the SSH session terminated at the other end and I was without an internet connection soon after.

I was still in high school when I did this... this was the days of windows 3.11 and DOS.

Their sysadmin thought the system just had a hardware failure and replaced the entire system... set up prettymuch the same. I never had the heart to tell them it was me...

The admin eventually got fired for incompetence. that was far from the only time the system caused an outage of dialup internet...

[vaempire4wii]

I have dun many mistakes. but the most recent was today only, i was downloading a 100 mb file with idm and when it was half way done my connection got lost due 2 my experiments . i didn't searched for temp files which were created by idm and i formatted my system. forget 2 mention that m on dialup.

[sonu27]

Buying a WinME computer, when WinXP just came out.

Edited January 7, 2007 by sonu27