Whoops - I didn't mean to do that!!

**TeddyRuxspin** · April 19th, 2001, 05:12 AM

Ture story!
Picture this..
Its 7am mid week. Im sat at my desk doing some minor changes to our Meridian Telephone Exchange. I decide to clean up a few of the direct dial in numbers.
I tap in a few keystrokes and then make an educated guess on how to remove the link between a DII and an extention. I type OUT and select list 1 (The one that has every single dial in number in it). Sunddenly it clears the entire list deleting over 150 numbers.

I sat back and took a deep breath. A small smile creeped accross my face.
"Whoops"
I then started to panic

I fixed it with BT's help but it goes to show how big a mess you can make with relative ease.

Do you have any similar stupid mistakes?

Pref. big ones like I deleleted the internet or I formatted the main file server.

**TeddyRuxspin** · April 19th, 2001, 05:20 AM

DOH!

Im still really hungover - I ment to put this into the Tech Tales (I did--sowulo)

DOH!
DOH!

/me Reaches for the Anadin and rolls over. "Err Whats your name again?"

**paranoid** · April 19th, 2001, 11:54 PM

From DOS, I thought I was still on the a: as I typed Del *.exe. I was in c:\windows.
ouch.
make matters worse? I did it twice in about 2 weeks.
ouch.
simple fix though....

**orange** · April 21st, 2001, 06:31 AM

Well, i've done the del *.* thing in DOS like Paranoid and wiped my whole drive.

I also deleted a couple of gigs or porn when i had a habit of holding the shift key down when hitting delete & enter. I'd actually meant to delete an empty directory but Explorer chose that moment to update the listree window and the wrong directory became highlighted without me realising until it was too late.

Another one was when i decided to ghost a clients system to a hidden backup partition. I'd spent all day setting up all his software, scanner, printer, CDRW and generally tweaking it too perfection and then ghosted the wrong way and wiped the lot - idiot!

CobraTekMax · April 21st, 2001, 11:23 AM

Back when overlay software first came out, I made the stupid mistake of trying to install it so I could see the full capacity of my 580MB hard drive AFTER I had already install Dos 6.22 and Win 3.1. I didn't lose anything vital, but it was kinda dumb of me not to read the manuals, and sacrifice a drive for a mere 60 MB.

**MacGyver** · April 21st, 2001, 12:03 PM

Originally posted by 'Cobra':
sacrifice a drive for a mere 60 MB.

Hey, back then 60MB actually meant something to the average user. I remember when I had a 540MB drive and I was constantly running out of space. No way I could afford another HD at the time, so I ended up screwing up a lot stuff by deleting files I shouldn't have.

**Sowulo** · April 21st, 2001, 01:10 PM

I reformatted quite a few machines just to install the overlay and go from 504Mb to 540Mb.

CobraTekMax · April 21st, 2001, 01:26 PM

Yeah, right on Mac & Suwolo. It's weird to think back to those days, when I had a 100MB HDD to start off with. I seriously had to decide whether I ABSOLUTELY had to have Paintbrush, Minesweeper and Solitaire installed or not. And backing up my DOOM saves on floppies so I could delete the directory, because I just HAD to use the precious 5MB DOOM took up for something else.

**bobmushroom** · April 21st, 2001, 01:47 PM

I oncehad a client who thought that cleaning a hard drive meant taking it apart and nullwiping the internal disk platters with washing up liquid. Amazingly 1 one of two drives he did this to actually worked afterwards..

**geeksRus** · April 21st, 2001, 07:33 PM

first week on the job i deleted every source code file for a very large program that did billing for a water company...boss just slapped me on the back and laffed at me...took me all day to recover them one at a time.
from then til now (almost twenty years) i double-check before i delete anything!

**KINGofBLEH** · April 21st, 2001, 09:23 PM

The worst I do is formatting the wrong partition after FDISK. Ouch! Once lost 10Gb of my app dev projects I was working on.

jimmr13 · April 21st, 2001, 11:16 PM

I once smoked, killed, melt down, murdered a Dell Server Runnung Exchange, Yep you got it Killed the Companies Main Exchange server with a cup of Coffee! Yep knocked it off the shelving while working on the new router !

**SubZero** · April 21st, 2001, 11:22 PM

I've literally zapped a 20GB disk. I was swapping disks w/o unplugging the power supply. I tried to connect the power cable backwards, and next thing you see is a blue arc. Toaseted the drive. Lucky for me, it just ran a scanner, and we lost no vital data. I told my boss, and he got a kick out of it. Told me next time to make sure to unplug the power cord from the power supply.

But did I learn my lesson, no. So I might zap another disk soon.