Once went to wipe a partition with dd. Unfortunately I forgot to specify the partition (used of=/dev/sda instead of of=/dev/sda3) so dd then wiped out every partition on my hard drive including all my linux and windows (not a great loss) ones and the mbr for good measure. Methinks dd stands for disk destruction. When I use dd nowadays I check at least 3 times before I hit the Enter key :-(

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It's not that dd is particularly dangerous. It's because the things you are trying to do with it are typically dangerous. You can destroy a disk just as effectively with "cp /dev/zero /dev/sd{X}".

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This was some years back; I was trying to update the BIOS on the motherboard of my main desktop, can't really remember if I even had a good reason for doing so, but i flashed the wrong version. No POST, had to order a new motherboard, even if I could have fixed it I had neither the know-how nor the equipment to do so. Never made that mistake again, then again - these days BIOS updates are pretty safe from my experience.

Used dd to install iso to /dev/sdb, what I didn't realize was that the drive order had changed during a reboot and /dev/sdb was now my hard drive.

The worst thing I ever did to my computer? I just made a Windows 7 Pro virtual machine to investigate a problem with some crusty Airbus software - .Net and DLL Hell! - Bah, humbug...

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*chuckles* Exactly the same as I did (only I used exabyte tapes), and ... I have never, ever done it again, once was once too often. Still makes me stop and and think twice before using the Enter-button on a 'rm'-command. It was 20 years ago - and it took me some 10 hours to get back again - was finally done 3am.

Spent 2 days or so building a stage 1 or 2 Gentoo box, can't remember which - the one that required bootstrapping and you had to compile the compiler that would compile everything else... Was doing it on an old pentium, probably early to mid 2000's. Finished the core OS install and was copying my user data from a backup drive, as root. Got the data copied, went to chown /home/myuser to my user and did a "chown -R me:me /" as root and was so tired I thought "slash, yeah, I am at the root of my home drive". You can see the problem here...it took about 10 seconds before I figured out what I just did and by then it was too late. Sigh...

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"chown -R me:me /" - That is so inefficient.

You should have done: "chown -R me: /"

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The worst thing I did was not fit a hose for my water cooling correctly and have it leak all over the internals of my PC. I dried everything in the microwave. Using the oven part to heat it up and then put the hardware in with the oven off. Luckily after this my PC still worked for years.

I've done so many some dumb things over the years. Unfortunately I seem to forgotten most of them rather than learning from them.. Here's one though: not even sure how I did it: wanted to update Slackware on my file server, and somehow overwrote the ARM version with the x86 version. Fortunately all the data was on a separate partition, making the reinstall relatively painless.

Left a CRT monitor in the van for a few hours on one of those cold, damp November days in Ireland. Van was not dry-lined. When I finished job #1 I went straight to job #2. Connected CRT monitor to PC, switched it all on and bang! That was the end of the monitor! Customer thanked me and told me he would call again if he ever needed me. That was about 15 years ago. Haven't had a call since. Electronics and condensation = unhappy marriage.

;-)

Stupidest thing: sold it (My Amiga).

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I have never done anything stupid with slackware. I always back up always double check everything.
Then I woke up.
Big Smile. I would not know where to start.

Once upon a time (early around y2k) made an encrypted loop-back image file (64MB) and had it a 32 char password.
Filled with valuable data...

... a week later found I forgot the exact password (32char!)

No matter what i try couldn't open or decipher it

*secure encryption*

It's worth nothing, that data was ultimately secure every since...

I cannot remember the stupidest thing I did to my computer now, but recently I certainly did something memorable:

I was configuring a virtual machine with a "linux" distribution then I decided to make an image of the disk, so I could save it for later use.
Then I thought: "Well, let me just make sure the image will compress as much as possible. I will write a big file filled with zeroes to the disk."


But when I realized there was a bug in my script at the following line:
Haha, it was too late. Bye-bye hours of work!


I was happy it was just a virtual machine. But it couldn't be.