Soft brick, yes thanks to DD and wrong drive. Hard brick yes, the sparks flew while working on things hot and the replacement parts were either not available or cost so much it was cheaper to buy new.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...4/#post5604175
"Samsung laptops including the 530U3C, NP700Z7C, NP700Z5C, and 300E5C series"

How about 'rooting' tablets/phones?

Update: Breaking NEWS: I just bricked a cheap M$Win Tablet,
by cluelessly messing with obscure options in its UEFI BIOS!!!
Won't power-on at all, any more. (no 'reset' pinhole, afaics)
Thanks jsb: now I'm terrified of UEFI & now will never learn >1% of Linux.

Same happened to my boss and I with a desktop unit when I was working at a small computer shop, boss bricked a customer's desktop when using a firmware file that was mis-uploaded for the wrong model.

if that counts, then i bricked my motherboard once.
used horizontally, there was a loose screw lying on it somewhere.
it died slowly - took weeks of getting worse to realise what was going on, and then it was too late.
lesson: use your mobo vertically!

The proverbial power cut while updating bios killed a customers MB, requiring replacement at my cost.

Depending on what the replacement cost you, you might have saved money if you had a similar mobo available. You remove the interrupted bios chip and replace it with the one from another mobo with the same I/O chip. However don't seat it firmly. It only requires light contact to function. Set the bios to cache bios data in ram so that the system will stay booted once up and long enough to complete a new flash application. Once up remove the working mobo's temporary replacement chip (while running) and insert the defective chip. Now you can properly flash the interrupted chip to completion and Voila ! Fixed! If the chip is easily accessed it can be completed in well under 15 minutes.

Note: I have only done this on mobos with floppy drive support so I am not certain if the I/O chip on every mobo these days supports USB but in that case a CD should work fine in most cases since so many can play music CDs without requiring boot up.

That is a function of the drive in most cases and will not help with BIOS updates.
As far as I have ever seen, BIOS updates have to be done from a floppy, A USB stick, or more often nowadays from within a working OS.

Doh! What was I thinking? LOL. Thank you for putting my head back on straight. So obvious now that the data on the CD is not read into ram so it won't boot without a functioning bios or at least the boot block (not overwritten in a flash) that handles optical drives, if any do. I know boot blocks handle floppies but wasn't sure if they deal with USB or Opticals these days.

Yeah I started down that path, but this was back before everything was available online (was a Pentium1 from memory) and I decided I would burn more of my time than a replacement board would cost (let alone finding someone with a similar board willing to let me try a hot swap on it - I could just as easily have been up for two replacements ... ).

Not yet, but I'm liable to do it sometime. I've a tendency to skim through instructions, then do what I THINK I've read, rather than what should be done.

Since this is the "brick thread" I'd like to point out that in over 2 dozen hot swap flashes no bricks were baked. I got so cocky I was trying numerous re-purposed bioses from different manufacturers/models... like an Asus bios on a PcChips mobo with similar chipsets. Some were disappointing but a few were a major boost although I was under 60 back then and possibly less apt to try such shenanigans today and soon I expect to not have to as I'm buying a SuperMicro performance mobo, made in the USA so replacement chips should be relatively quick and easy.

Depending on who you buy it from - there is one company we've used that is building SuperMicro equipment and:
a) When we have a problem they try to deny it exists.
b) They take days to come up with suggestions like "try reseating it" as if we wouldn't hve done that BEFORE calling them.
c) When they say they'll "overnight" they mean they'll order the part to be shipped to them, supposedly test it and then "overnight" after they've tested. We had a Production system down for 2 weeks owing to their shenanigans. Luckily the Dell server we'd replaced with that crap hadn't been decommissioned yet so we were able to bring up the old server to work around this.
d) Every time we return a part they claim it was damaged in return shipment so we have to pay for the replacement.

Thank you for the feedback but I don't expect any difficulties. First off the quality I'm buying and the fact that SuperMicro has their eyes on developing a user base for gaming/performance PCs is some guarantee to me. Also I will buy it from either Newegg (most likely) or Aamazon, both of whom have given me excellent service. In the case of Newegg I have been buying regularly from them for about 19 years. The reviews I read sit just where I want, near the top but not at the top for performance but extreme parts quality and overbuilding for long, stable service.

Given a lot of you's have "bricked it" before, I thought... why not me? ...so I did...

I run the rm -rf / as root but, it said something to the effect of "this very dangerous" (which is very true, of course). So I had to use a certain option to convince it.

So... I did!!

Only problem was that it also deleted the shutdown command but did not crash CentOS 7... And the "Hibernate" option was still listed on the KDE menu.

So I had to click the close button on the VM window...

I restarted the VM only to get the grub rescue screen.

I've attached some screenshots just for you's. Enjoy!

So in short with a certain option with the rm -rf / command, it really does kill your system!

It was fun...

Attached Thumbnails

     

i bricked my dsl modem. not sure what happened to it.