Generally speaking, I told my girlfriend the truth even though I wanted to keep her around!
Upshot: do I want to be right, or would I rather be happy? LOL

Older IBM bus architecture, I'm thinking it was an ISA card. I was tasked with testing various daughter cards which meant a lot of plugging and unplugging of cards. They asked me to show the differences in behavior with a few of the cards to one of the senior VPs. I ran through it 5 minutes before with my boss, they bring the VP in there; I plugged in the first card, something I'd done a hundred times before and the system totally wouldn't boot. We worked at it for a bit, even the VP gave it a try, then left shaking his head. The boss wasn't all that pleased and asked me to figure out what went wrong. Couldn't. Turned out one of the pins got misaligned and when the card went in, it got shoved over to the opposite side and crushed; shorting out the connector; but only in such a way that it happened when there was a card inserted in that slot to hold the bent pin right up against the opposing side. We had to send the PC out for repair to find that out, it took about 2 months to get resolved. So I was a real happy student intern that Summer.

I have done the rm -rf * in the wrong place too!

I was an idiot last night.
I ran "apt-get dist-upgrade" and entered "y" on my PC whilst paying attention to something I was doing on my Pi. It was only after the process completed that I realised I had just wiped out the NVIDIA drivers as those in Sid are not currently compatible with the version of X11 (or something along those lines, didn't check the details). The silly thing is I had been running dist-upgrade with my finger on the "n" key for a good few days waiting to see whether the situation would change so I knew what would happen.
Now I just have to work out how check when the NVIDIA drivers from the repository will install again and use the installer direct from NVIDIA in the mean time...
Still, I was toying with the idea of a new graphics card so if I do decide to do that at least I have drivers which would support it.

Buying a VGA to HDMI cable thinking it would work from laptop to TV without a anolog to digital converter box.

Should have searched 1st before buying. But was in a hurry.;

Giving PCBSD a try, by attempting to add it to an existing Linux HD, without reading up on it first or doing any kind of study.
My annoyance over the predictably trashed partition table and lost home dir was only surpassed by my irritation at myself for not reading first.


"Measure twice, cut once" - meh. Judge it by eye, lay into it with the wrong saw, make an utter hash of it then retire to a safe distance muttering about "and that's why we invented plastic".

I think the cable sellers should take some of the blame here unless the packaging/website (depending where you bought it) had it in fairly big letters that one was required. I would even go so far as to say this was approaching a confidence trick.
Granted if you know a little about these things you could probably work out that something would be required to do analogue to digital conversion but I don't think an average consumer should be expected to know that.

@273
Maybe a good time to try out the nouveau project - it's improved a lot in the last year.

As for my own 'oopses' there is the usual collection of "bugger, wrong drive" and "oh crap, wrong dir".

Most recent facepalm moment was with a Dell laptop with one of those stupid slot-load DVD drives.
It swallowed a DVD, then failed to either read or eject it.
After searching in vain for a method of "encouraging it" embarked on the complete teardown of the machine and partial dismantle of the drive itself to extract said disk.
It was only after reassembling and powering on that I discovered the drive still thought it had a disc in it and proceeded to do the disk-read-fail cycle endlessly...

Thanks, I did wonder about giving it a try but I think that Steam and another couple of things I use require the proprietary drivers still.

Arguing with a opinion on this forum.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sheeple.png

I once forgot to compile some modules like the scsi controller and some others in crux linux. Crux linux doesn't use an initrd image, so you must have certain modules compiled into the kernel. After I did rebuilding of the kernel it booted crux just fine.

One more for the list.

Making a SD card for booting a Beaglebone Black. Instead of formatting and making new file systems, I noticed that the partitions and file systems were all fine and I needed to erase whatever was on each partition, boot and root and then copy over the contents from my local archive. Boot went fine, it's small and takes few seconds to erase and copy over. Root was a different story. I don't know the details I was doing other stuff and my system went haywire. What I can gather is that a symbol, link, .... something caused the rm -rf to change off of my SD card mount directory and began removing stuff from my core system. It died because it killed enough of the system to not make it be able to work anymore! I was only able to see that the rm operation had encountered some form of unknown redirect and then couldn't do anymore except rebuild my system. Since the rm operation was done as root to resolve the BBB disk file ownership, it was a very, dangerously powerful command and lousy result.

Days like yesterday make me happy I store a ton of redundant stuff on and off system.

i know how that goes, i did something like that the other day on a customer's machine, i was trying to erase the contents of a tarball manually by
except the process removed most of /lib and /usr/lib etc.. so i ended up with an unstable but semi functional system, i had to manually restore a couple library files and then run a
to reinstall all installed packages
and even that didn't fully work so ultimately it was quicker to copy the user's data off the machine and reformat

i also took a 2TB hard drive owned by a friend of mine (well more a friend of my boss than mine) and installed it in a machine, and reformatted it from NTFS to ext4 because i was puttint it into a Linux server, incorrectly thinking the drive was blank, but it not only wasn't blank it had irreplaceable pictures of friends of his who had since passed on and a lot of other irreplacable data of personal significance. was unable to recover the data. I was forgiven since it was an innocent mistake, and a miscommunication but I still feel bad about that one.

I put my filesystems in lvm with dm-crypt. Booted up a live cd, backed up the filesystems, created the dm-crypt container, created the logical volumes, restored the filesystems, updated the initramfs. Went to reboot and was greeted with cryptsetup: lvm not available. Whoops, forgot to install lvm. Doh!

Oh boy.

When I was new to linux, I was trying to delete some csound library files. So in /lib, as root I did: "rm libc*" (Yeah I know it's installed to /usr/local.)

Another time I deleted bash. I don't remember how I did it. My best friend's brother was running the same distro, same version, so simlinked bash to another shell so I could function and ftped over a fresh copy of bash.

There's also the time I compiled a kernel without ext2 support. (And was using ext2 at the time.)

Yesterday, I installed another hard drive in my home server. I went into gparted, opened sdd, (since I had just installed the 4th drive), and formatted. Little did I know that I had reversed SATA ports 3 and 4... so I essentially wiped a third of my software RAID-0. I first realized that something was worng when the boot screen started filling me with errors and dumped me into a rescue shell. And since the RAID had been setup during the Debian install and I hadn't touched a RAID since. I eventually fixed and reformatted the RAID thanks to the Arch wiki...
Fortunately, I constantly rsync everything with a 1TB external HDD (and everything is also on my laptop), so I didn't lose a thing. Thank God for backups!!