Biggest Computer Goof / Advice Needed

[ravenheart 6]

What's been yer biggest computer related goof? Mine was an old computer with dual HDD's and after deciding to reformat the OS drive I instead formatted my data drive heh, 

 

 

Advice Sought:  I have an older mac mini in my closet, I was once running a dd format on it and the power went out scrambling the drive, I tried many things to bring it back to life but it's simply not recognized anymore, Anyone have some advice or things to try so I can dust it off and bring it back into use? It annoys me when I look in my closet and see it sitting there on the shelf next to my heels heh

[zhang888 1066]

Mixing up if and of in dd some years ago. The intention was to make an external backup,
the outcome was that I needed an external backup to recover from such mistake.

dd if=backup.img of=/dev/sda instead of dd of=backup.img if=/dev/sda .

[rickjames 106]

Mixing up if and of in dd some years ago. The intention was to make an external backup,

the outcome was that I needed an external backup to recover from such mistake.

 

dd if=backup.img of=/dev/sda instead of dd of=backup.img if=/dev/sda .

 

I did something similar making a bootable thumb drive, oops wrong one, and is wasn't even my thumb drive lmao. But hey I had a bootable 256gb thumb drive now, and a pissed off friend.

 

Not sure if anyone vapes here, but my vape mod has a battery cover with a magnet, apparently a strong magnet. Walked into the next room holding the vape mod and a hard drive in the same hand. insta paperweight.

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Biggest goofs are storage-related goofs, it seems...

One of mine was a backup fail shortly before a hard drive failure.

 

After 2.5 years of operation, write operations got slow. I assumed it was Windows' fault because of my experience with Windows XP and Vista - they too start getting slow after a few years. I decided to backup important things, reformat the drive and do a complete reinstallation of Windows 7.

Installation took many hours - too many hours. After it completed, I looked at the SMART values of the hard drive and noticed that critical values went up. Every start worsened the situation, and after a few more tests I noticed that even simple write operations contributed to it. A few more starts and halts and... it died.

So I bought a new one and installed Windows 7 on it. This took 5 minutes! I set it up and restored my important information...

.. except for the APPDATA folder which contained Mozilla profiles, instant messenger conversation logs, configuration files and more. The conversations partly documented how I dived deeper into computers, and in the backup it was missing. I didn't back it up. I forgot it. I lost a part of my documented personal history and needed to reconfigure/customize most programs again. The results never were as good as on the broken hard drive again.

And the best part: Not only did I not backup APPDATA, I even might have physically overridden some files by reinstalling it. So I never might get back everything I lost even if the drive would work again.

 

Remember: If you do backups, not only encrypt them but make sure you include everything.

[flat4 79]

Biggest goof, I bought a windows computer

 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N920A using Tapatalk

[OmniNegro 155]

My biggest mistake with regards to my PC was installing something I got from an untrusted source without even bothering to run the installer sandboxed. It closed out instantly and then my CPU usage spiked. I pulled the plug and formatted all hard drives I have, remade my entire partition table, installed Windows, two versions of Linux, and a boatload of applications.

 

There were many files and settings that I lost, and I could not trust any of the data on the drives since any of it could have been manipulated. But it is better to err on the side of caution than to risk all for convenience.