Just bored tonight ... so I thought I'd start this little thread. Searched but didn't find a similar one on LQ.

So, here's my story:
I have worked in a Windows world for many years, and Linux for only a relatively few.
I needed some files from my Windows 2000 web server, so I created a temporary directory on my Linux desktop, then mounted a share to the Windows server.

After I finished my website updates, I decided I didn't need the directory on my desktop any more. Ok, so ... I'll just delete it. I issued the delete command on the directory and walked away.

A while later I got a call from the boss ... "The website's down! Fire! Fire!" Hmmm ...

I went for a look-see and found that all of my website files had vanished ... ALL 4GB OF THEM!

Was I hacked? Was there a virus? Was there a file system problem? Did I lose a drive?

Thoughts immediately began to fly through my head ... mostly of my ill-fated life.

I sat back down in my office for a think-break, and when I looked at my Linux screen, I noticed that there was a nice ... long ... list of files that said they had been deleted.

I turns out that I forgot to umount my directory before deleting it.

Luckily for me, I was able to restore my site from a recent backup.

What 2 lessons did I learn?
1. Always check your mount status BEFORE deleting a directory.
2. Mount RO any time possible.

Ok, enough from me ... what disaster tales have you to tell?

...and use 'rmdir' to remove a directory, not 'rm -Rf' :P

Worst that I've had is my old boss (who wasn't very good with backups) deleted a whole directory of "Global" data for our company off a Samba server... Did I mention he wasn't very good at backups? Never did manage to restore anything by playing with inodes and all that jazz

The worst I've done is 'rm -Rf /' but I did that on purpose on a development box I was reloading - just so I could post in forums and say I've done it :P

Worst one of my staff has done is fiddle with nsswitch.conf and basically disabled login... The most annoying part was that he went home and I was left to work back and find out what he'd done!! After dropping our ERP server to single user of course. That staff member doesn't have root access anymore...

Heh... You'll love this story... This one time, I .... No, wait, that wasn't me...

Oh well.

I once misplaced my wireless mouse.

Okay - I was installing Linux on 2 different systems at the same time: Little and my mom's laptop. I was adjusting partition sizes on Little and installing Mandrake 10.0 on the laptop . . . or so I thought. As it turns out, I did it the other way around and erased the laptop and overwrote Slackware on the other one. I had to scramble to make things right and luckily enough my mom had her own recent backups of the laptop's important data.

I have since learned two things:
1. Computers are better at multitasking than I am.
2. When it comes to installation, one computer at a time.

i tried to format a disk in my zip drive which had allwasy been sda1,

when i formatted it, it diddnt wiurr
i relised that the USB had fallen out and my pen drive (normally sdb1) had become sda1

so i just wiped out my pen drive....

took me ages to find all teh files again from disorganised random backups on diffenrt computers!

Well, it' not quite as bad as the classic rm -Rf / but I needed to chown a load of stuff in my home directory.

chown -R tred:tred /home/tred/* as root went OK. Then I realised all those "hidden" .files hadn't been matched by the "*" and still needed chowning.

So (again as root) I did chown -R tred:tred /home/tred/.*

I thought it was taking rather a l-o-n-g time. So I <CTRL><C>'d it. Then realised that ".*" matches "..". Ooops!
..... It was time for a new distro anyway.

I've managed to fsck-up my /home directory twice now. I'm convinced it has something to do with Fedora Core using device labels instead of device names in fstab. Apparently you can give two different partitions the same label, which confuses the !@#$ out of fsck when it runs automatically after a restart/bootup.

Trying to install Linux on my Mom's machine. No seriously, it gave me all sorts of problems. First try: Alright something easy to use, Mandrake! No dice, after installation I noticed there was no sound. Turns out I needed a new driver that was in a newer kernel. I remember trying to look for a new one in the official repository for this distribution. Nope, not there. I had to download a vanilla kernel and hope I can get it to boot.

Well it did, but the sound came out all fuzzy.

Second try: SimplyMEPIS, since Mandrake didn't work, I decided to give this a try since I had good experiences with it in the past. Same problem with the audio drivers, but instead of installing a newer kernel I decided to remove this distro from the system in favour of...

Third try: Gentoo Linux, I use this distro all the time, so I figure "If she needs help, she can just ask me." I did a Stage3 install if I remember correctly. After installing the base system, I test the audio with mpg123 (After making sure the drivers are loaded, and the devices are unmuted), same problem with the audio being all fuzzy.

At this point, I thought nothing was wrong. And since I didn't install GRUB to the bootloader yet, it won't effect her since Windows is still installed on the main drive. I turned the machine off, and gone to bed since it was night time.

In the morning I was greeted with, "How come I get no sound?" I thought oh shit, what happened? The drivers for the sound card was installed in Windows correctly, I tried reinstalling the drivers, no dice. Reinstalled the OS, no dice. Stumped, I opened the computer and saw something terrible... The PCI slot where the sound card was in was scorched! I moved the sound card to a different slot to see if it still worked, and thank god, it did. I couldn't explain what caused it, but I knew in my mind that something I did in Linux was the culprit. I decided to format the drive I was using to install Linux on in to a Windows readable File System and stayed away from installing Linux on it ever again. Oh the horror, THE HORROR!

Not me, but someone that once worked for me had a little accident with SuSE OpeneXchange... There was a communication issue of some kind and the owner of the company ended up vacuuming all of his contacts & appointments off of the server, then synching to his Palm and losing everything...

I don't remember anymore how we recovered from that, but it was a DISASTER! :-)

Once I corrupted my entire Debian box, will never touch it again.!!

While messing with Yum I kept uninstalling the Gnome session. The first time I did that that I was very confused.

too many of them ... so much so that i forgotton about the detail of each of them ...


//btw ... nowadays home pc are super fast and super big ... so , dont be afraid of disasters ...


.

I suppose I have a couple but the worse, by far, was not the fault of any person. It was a hard-drive failure on a woman's machine. Naturally, it was a little more complicated than just that:

*) this happened the day her father died (hours after actually)
*) she had been taking pictures of him during his last days and storing them on the computer when the camera was full
*) she had emptied her camera onto the machine the night before so she would have space when she saw him in the morning
*) we did not have a consistent backup regimen at the time -- so she wasn't backing things up

At first, when she called, I thought she had left a floppy in the drive (even though I turn floppy booting off in the bios). But I soon realized what we were dealing with after I drove an hour to take a look at it in person. And when she understood that all of those images might be gone for good she nearly had a complete breakdown. It was too much for her at the time.

I grabbed a spare drive... an ice-cold case of Mountain Dew... and some other supplies and locked myself in a room for the next 6+ hours. By some twist of fate, the drive was still readable... but was failing so badly that the effort to read from it warmed it up too much. The boot area was gone but I had different partitions and her data was on one of the few remaining ones. By booting from another drive and using care, I was able to slowly extract a few images at a time... before needing to reboot because the drive would lock up the machine when it overheated. A fan, blowing directly on the exposed drive and several cans of compressed air (misused) added a little bit more time before starting again... but it was still very slow going.

In the end... I got everything off the drive. All I promised to try for was those pictures. But I got lucky and managed to get her other files too. I did a full reinstall on a new drive and brought all her stuff over. When we booted up the new drive, she nearly sobbed with joy to see that everything was exactly like it was before the drive failure. Right down to her smallest setting. She got very lucky.

Today that system (as well as all the others there) are religiously backed up over the network. It would take the simultaneous failure of at least three drives (hers and two on the RAIDed backup server) to lose any data. They have learned their lesson. That was the worst disaster to come to mind... and it was hell for a day there.

Nothing this serious so far, but my friend did move my /home/ryan partition to /home/.lol. so everytime i booted i didnt get very far. confusing and i spent a bit of time on it before he told me what he had done. Quite funny really.

Other things include formating the wrong partition, deleting folders with mounted net shares, but thankfully nothing serious.

But it has all taught me well.

Ryan