Weekend Open Forum: Your biggest tech failures

The first time I tried installing Linux on a command line... partitions simply went kaboom >.<

I killed my 400GB 5,400RPM laptop hard drive after I set the swap size to 50GBs once. I let the computer hibernate so I could eat dinner, then came back to find a SMART disk error staring me in the face. I owned the laptop for a single day.

Nothing too bad for me so far (Knocks on wood A LOT!! ) Had my Nvidia 512mb 9800GT die on me a couple months back. Made me really sad . Luckily I had just picked up a computer at a garage sale for $20 that had a 1gb 8800GTS in it with the dual slot cooler . I think it actually runs better than my old 9800gt

There were a few, but one that's particularly memorable was when I borrowed a Radeon 9500. In the early days of shaders ATI had a programming competition and I decided to program Frogger using pixel shaders. I did most of the work using the reference device (very slow software emulation), but the last weekend before submission I wanted to run it on a real card for debugging.

So I borrowed a Radeon 9500 from work, and installed it. It worked fine, but I guess the extra power wasn't connected well (I remember having problems with it), or the board just didn't tolerate the power use well enough. I didn't notice anything immediately, but the PC began to freeze occasionally, even after returning the card. Long story short, it turned out that not only had something in the AGP slot fried, but a memory slot along with it.

I ended up replacing that Pentium 3 and motherboard for an Athlon XP. It was a pretty cheap upgrade and a great performance boost.

video card fan burnt right off the card. I needed a newer better one anyway

By the way, I won a Radeon 9800 Pro on that competition, so all in all I had a much better PC in the end (had a GeForce 3 before that).

In late 90s (I think 98/99) I lost a Quantum HDD, I was using excel preparing some financial briefs, and when I hit Ctrl + S, PC just hung up, and as last resort when I pressed the reset button, nothing happened ..... so the long and short of it after fiddling around for a while it was clear the HDD had suddenly decided to die on me taking all my data along with it (as when it was disassembled it was beyond any recovery attempt). Other minor issues has been losing motherboards few times (once in a P3, and twice last year on my C2D rig).

One last bit, recently I found a fin from my Radeon 5770's fan resting on the PSU after somehow it decided to part ways with the fan (have no idea how it happened as I usually clean my system once every 45 days or so .... so it was discovered when I opened it for the same purpose), a minor blip hopefully which won't affect fan's overall performance

My Monitor fried due to a power surge....on my birthday

"Flames charred his chassis while the electrical surge fried his Asus ROG motherboard, Core 2 Quad Q8300, GeForce GTX 280, 8GB of RAM, 256GB RealSSD C300, and even his aftermarket CPU fan. Only his hard drive and Blu-ray player survived to tell the tale."

My deepest condolences...
BTW the picture is cute..

Was playing Counter Strike Source multiplayer one day and then all of a sudden my pc just shut down, no warning whatsoever. My PSU had died. I had bought it from another country where appliances used different voltages to function. Total mistake from my part.

i killed my D946G board (probably) by cleaning it up w/o grounding equipment. it randomly shut itself down and soon after won't start.

and killed 2x microsoft wireless mouse in the process of replacing its led due to moist hands while soldering it, short-circuit, again.

Biggest F-up was when I decided that I didn't want linux anymore.
[On to literary present tense]
Opened up Acronis, and deleted the partition, and shut down...few days later, GRUB ERROR 22. Oops. Ok, well at least I learned that GRUB is installed on the linux partition for future reference.
Timing's not bad either, I just made my flashdrive bootable and wanted to test out some of the disk utilities. This should be easy to fix.

I went through a frustrating series of reinstalling linux, trying to overwrite the MBR with windows XP default, screwing with my flashdrive utilities and what not I don't even know.
Screw it, I'd need to clean out viruses and uninstall untold hoards of bloatware and sh%! in general anyway.

Boot up into my flashdrive; SELECT VOLUME TO FORMAT:
14983268 KB
56538921 KB
15298478 KB
Uh, bleh...IDK I think my flashdrive is the third one...WRONG.

Blanked my newly set up flashdrive; no backup.
Somehow, it also really effed $#@! up and the computer would not even boot off a CD, so it was completely toast.
Well, I got to build another one.

My computer got an extra 80GB, and I picked out the power supply to use the 12v rail. Of course I learned a lot too.

My laptop is super selective, the WiFi only works at home, in my grandmother's house and in a friend's house. When I try bringing it to other places, it suddenly goes Blue screen!

another thing..

I bought a new USB last last week I think. Stored valuable files, pictures, videos and installers that took hours to get. Removed it(properly) and plugged it in after a few house and poof! all my files suddenly disappeared.

A really really sad story.

I was once formatting an old hard drive, hooked up with with a usb adapter and external power supply, when suddenly, I heard a loud crack, followed by a stinging sensation in my arm. I had the drive upside down, with the pcb facing up, and apparently, the controller chip exploded and I got a nice piece of cmos fragment in my left arm, dug in about 5mm. I can't imagine having gotten hit in the face with that.....

Dude, I've been there. That really stinks. A ground-to-cloud lightning struck our home back in the 90's, split a 150 year old oak in half, landed in the house's ground-wiring, took out almost everything grounded inside the house (TV, dish, water heater, telephones, you name it). Not the computers though, but the telephone jacks virtually exploded! Nothing a fire extinguisher couldn't handle, fortunately.

(*harkle*)

Some big failures (been through a lot of them...) would include the installing of my Corsair TX850 (brand new). I installed it in a pretty neat PC (2008), and the PC did not start any more. I repeated the process on another PC, same results - both PC's did not start. I restored them, but to no avail, they both went ka-putt. Turns out the Corsair PSU was faulty, and shorted out both PC's on contact. Only an ATi Radeon 7000 survived, and even it is a bit funny sometimes.

Oh yeah, my sister once dropped her cellphone in liquid nitrogen. Don't ask how it happened, it's embarrassing - It still worked, but the SIM-card froze. Literally...

During the construction of the newest PC (the old one accidentally burned due to cable shortage), once completed - did not start. Five hours of intense hardware diagnostics followed to no avail. Hey presto, the PSU-button was flicked off...

James Bond failed his mission so to speak. He forgot to refuel his car.

Always had a desktop with PSU capable of switching voltage.
As my tower CPU was always placed below the table and one fine day， my baby cousin came and accidentally switched the voltage of the PSU.

After bidding farewell to them, I switched on the power and my desktop got fried..

Lost data on 3 hard drives, two nvidia graphics cards over the years , and my mobo is starting to go at the minute some peeps have no luck lol lol