The stupidest thing I've done on the computer? Probably, installed Windows Just kidding, Windows does have its place in my workload (mostly due to MS Access which I use at work) so I always have one working installation of Win.

Back to the question:
In my distro-hopping days - I would mess up a bootloader on a regular basis which would really drive me mad. Clicking before thinking (twice) was what I was suffering from

Well one that I do on a regular basis is leave a DVD from a distribution I have installed in a VM in the drive, then shutdown.

Then I am quite startled when I later boot up to see the installation screen for some other distro pop up.

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LOL! we (my friends & co.) did this on real machines of the day , and quite on few occasions!
- tapes (!)
- floppy (each 5.25 and 3.5 ones)
- CD
- DVD

You name it, and we had it covered all (Yes we go way back with those numerals...)

Luckily there are but few OSes able to install without "good love", and none was at hand in that time .

the way VMs work, only time is lost (if restore points are properly set , that is! )

Here an semi OT:
1. Not me personally
2. Not a computer
But do read on it's related:

It was the time, back then, when we went to a computer (the 8 bit era) with a tiny screwdriver (2.3 x 0.5 mm tip or the like) or a hairpin if desperate. Just to be able to adjust the head of the tape drive, so the "program loads".
After a few tries, one would manage to get lucky, and there the session would commence.
Tedious, to put it short and mildly.
The glorious days of "<-L" and Commodore 64 supreme reign...

Then the 5.25" floppies came along, and we where both so exited and tired of "azimuth seeking".
One of the first floppies a friend of mine bought, was for one of his most favorite games.
He was so proud and happy.
And on a floppy disk too - non English speaker as we where back then, we could merely understand the disks where "flexible", so we assumed fold-able.
Little did we know to what degree...
He did not only fold his floppy disk, and not only twice
He did press the folds flat, in fact so flat, that the double folded floppy would not wrinkle his summer shirt he wore that evening. At least not too much.
Elbows atop his head (sort of like Popeye) did he walk into our club, proudly did he present us with his item:
"what does he do with that, is it a list on paper?, no wait..."
He unfolded it and tried to use it...

The rest is history...

But one of the epitome of "the stupidest thing" in IT of all times.

Haha, that's the kind of command which I start to write "from the right" not having the "valid command" ready (like mails where I don't add recipients without finishing it)...

Problem is I type too fast, and sometimes hit the validation key (or send key) without willing it, and this can leads to bad situations .

Sometimes I also just first type a hash (#), then type the line safely (it's a comment), when I'm sure, I kill the leading hash and returns.

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About 15 years ago I was helping a person with a new Windows XP system and some partition management. I inadvertently deleted the partition tables. "Empty" disk! I felt as though I had swallowed my heart. Then I realized I had not modified anything and was able to restore the partitions. I can live with doing something stupid on my computers but I was horrified this was somebody else's.

Interesting! I have a similar habit, When using the bash history and I am searching for a potentially disruptive command, I immediately press the Home key and delete the first part of the full command.

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Looks to the date -- I once typed to somebody that I loved her.
Edit: sorry some "love day" stuff reminded me and I forgot the computer angle -- it made a container voyage and died a few months later having just been shuttled between docks and never seen the destination.

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This thread should be in General — I've only found it by accident.

In the days when I used to review distros, I got a bit impatient with an installer and wondered if it had registered my ENTER, so I did it again. Unfortunately, it had registered the first ENTER and, instead of ignoring the second, it saved it for the next screen. The default on that was "Erase the whole disk", and it didn't ask for confirmation.

I remember when I worked in the Civil Service, I came in one day and found my terminal in wounded-snail mode. I rang the administrator and found that no-one else had bothered to tell him (typical civil servants). It turned out that the backup routine was set to run in the night after the last user logged out, but if some-one left a terminal running it was set to start backing up at 9 a.m.

rm /usr/* as root

dd if=salix64-fluxbox-14.1.iso of=/dev/sda bs=1M

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Years ago my lovely wife had a external hard drive with family photos dating 20 years. Well ... I was distro hoping and I decided to create a ISO for testing dd if= of=/dev/sdx I chose the wrong drive and wiped the whole 1 Tb of data. I silently switched the drive and she did found it a year later and blamed me (can you believe it?) I denied having anything to do with it but there is always a doubt.

Another occasion, I was working in a data center for D-----. The facility is supply with 3 different utilities companies and 3 generator plus a room full of batteries (the whole critical power system) Being the only license electrician in the property I told one of the apprentices "that red button is always press by electrician" Yes it was the shunt trip for the whole building include the 4000 amp switch-gear feeding the server farm. The building makes backup of all the credit card transactions and one of the TV channels own by the client. Well I stepped outside for 5 minutes when I hear one of the generator starting, I knew immediately that this was trouble, I went inside and the apprentice is laughing and the building manager is giving hell because they loose 11 millions dollars per minute that they are offline... After the incident the client upgraded their camera system, and the contractor policies. I was lucky that we did not got fired.

Certainly one of the top 5 here?

Then it would be another one of those stupid daily things I do on my computer.

Paying attention and then posting a reply in the General section of this forum.

Hardware wise? Blew apart my IBM Z-70 laptop upgrading the Pentium M 770 on it.
Installed the CPU upside down. The motherboard gave me the finger and ignored me after that.

Decided that I wanted to upgrade glibc. So I did. Not a single binary worked after that. Not sure what I was expecting to happen, but I ended up reinstalling right afterward lol :-)

No need to reinstall from scratch. Boot your installation DVD, mount your partition(s), and then you can use something like this :

In that case, it would effectively be a downgrade.

Cheers,

Niki

lol, thankyou for starting this thread, this happens to me all the time, due to memory loss and other things, I forgot the other week that i had ALL my pictures in one folder in the home directory, then i kinda I accidentally deleted all my videos and pictures of myself and my partner, when i was installing 14.2.

she is not pleased, she cried for about 2 days.

on the other hand, the slack install is going strong.