Ever bricked a PC or a device?
 

I've been lucky and have never managed to "brick" a PC or a device before.

Have you ever done it?

Bricked a laptop when the company uploaded an incorrect firmware update when it was actually for a different model.

There are 2 kinds of admins in the world. Those who have made serious mistakes causing issues and those who lie and say they've never done it. :D

The few times I've foobared something it was usually software. I think all admins at some point have done "rm -rf *" in / or some other critical directory.

The one time I *think* I fried a PC/server was when I made the mistake of inserting or removing an HBA while the server was powered on. Luckily we'd just gotten that from a distributor so I was able to send it back as DOA.

Another time I intended to reread an inittab (back when that was common to do for serial devices) and instead hit typed "init 0". That brought the site down and I had to admit to my manager what I'd done after it came back up. Her question: Did it resolve the issue? My answer was that it did so she didn't seem concerned.

Years ago I worked at a Fortune 500 where our primary database went down. We declared a disaster and sent staff to our DR site to rebuild there while some of us stayed in Atlanta with some building the site on our test/dev environment and others bring the original production back live. That caused nearly a week of downtime to get data back to where it had been. After that for 6 months they spent time trying to do an RCA even though there was no clear reason for that outage.
About a year later we experienced another severe outage and one of the DBAs admitted he'd done a fat finger that caused it. He offered to resign but our management was happy to actually know the REASON the outage occurred they let it pass.
Moral of that story is it is often better to admit mistakes than try to hide them.

I worked at that same job with an admin that overwrote SAN drives by trying to add them to a VG. I went to him and explained that we pre-allocate space so if he ever sees any he thinks is available it probably is not. I noted the extra path had not been added to the VG which is why it looked available. I told him due to that he didn't really do anything procedurally wrong but should be aware in future and let me know. Instead of taking the constructive advice he denied he'd done what I said even though it was clear from his shell history that he'd done exactly that. After that I never trusted him.

I've bricked my rockbox device a few times, I blame fat32 for being extremely fragile. That said its easy to fix. :)

Network cards often get bricked.

If accidentally wiping a HD counts as bricking, yes!

According to Wikipedia, that's what you can call a "soft brick". That's because you can just re-install the OS, in the worst case situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_...cs)#Soft_brick

define "bricked"?

i only know the term from the world of android kiddies, where it means that you are unable to boot anything, and somehow the case is considered hopeless ("hard brick").
i've never seen that happen with a pc or similar device.
a soft brick is just an unbootable system or what.

since i'm using the real linux these terms have no place in my life.

and i haven't "bricked" my phone, either.

Bricked my Chromebook. Then I fixed it.

bricked my iPhone by letting half-built software run on it and not killing it before disconnecting from the IDE. stupid

Isn't that just a case of re-boot it??? :)

I take "bricking" to mean "the device is only usable as landfill", so no. Probably absence of bad luck.

As for the equivalent of - no. Well, once. Or twice. A few times at most, maybe.

I bricked my Zareason tablet trying to put Debian on it following instructions that I later realized were quite out of date.

It still turns on, but is otherwise useless. One of the days, I might try to reflash it, but real life keeps getting in the way.

By the way, Zareason is no longer in the tablet business. My guess is that they just did not sell enough of them to be worth their while. Shame, too, it was a real nice piece of kit.

I've never bricked an entire PC but then I always build my own, the only exceptions being less than half a dozen OEMs out of hundreds since 1985. When I was just getting started in computing I found sources for older gear and newer gear that had broken beyond a store's ability to fix them. Some companies just didn't or couldn't mess with returns primarily due to shipping costs so a few kind souls collected their broken stuff and every couple of weeks I'd collect a boxfull. So I did heavy duty, risky experimentation like hot swapping BIOS chips and flashing with images from different manufacturers with the same basic chipsets, toyed with radical cooling, modifying solder traces and pinouts to allow a socket to employ a newer cpu, and on and on. Most worked out but after so many with such deep risks I bricked lots of items.

I also toyed with DOS Debug (simplified Assembly) and altered settings with it as well as used Modbin to customize or unhide various bios settings. I ran every command offered in DOS 5 and 6.22 just to see for myself what it looked like and what it could do. You might say I graduated from the Phoenix school of crash, burn and resurrect. It was great fun as well as a terrific learning experience and cost me almost nothing but time and effort.

Bricked an old Sony Xperia phone a couple of years ago trying to install a 3rd party ROM, but I was able to recover it.