I've been using computers since I was six years old. I've used just about everything from PCs with 386s and DOS 5 all the way of through the latest versions of Windows, and four years ago, I switched to Mac. So you'd think, with all my experience, I would have thought twice about this.
Tonight, while I was working on my iBook, I was cleaning up the drive and trying to squeeze a little more speed out of it when I came across this folder labeled "etc". Not having noticed it before on my other Macs as something important, I promptly dumped it in the Trash, whereupon the computer prompted me for my password. Here's when I should have thought twice, but no, I fired in the password, and thought nothing more of it. About twenty minutes later, I go to use Spotlight and it won't respond. I get a search box, but no actual searching. I decide to go and find Terminal so I can check on something, and lo, it won't even start, claiming my Admin values have been set to 0 or something obscure like that. No problem, says I, I'll just restart the computer, as it's obviously having a meltdown.
Only to be greeted by a black screen, with a command prompt and the words "/etc not found". It turns out "etc" is a very important folder after all. *sigh* It's a good thing I keep bootable backup copies of my system drives lying around, but seriously, what possessed me to delete that folder and pay no immediate heed to the password request?
Anyone else have a moment(s) like this one they want to share?
I've had a similar experience, I once had a an anti-virus program that had more power then I knew... It had caught a virus and asked me what to do with it, without thinking I chose to delete the file. Now, normally deleting a system registry file isn't aloud in windows but for whatever reason this anti virus did it, I later shut down the computer and of course when I tried to start it.. it couldn't be done.. this was on a laptop so I had to go and get a reader for the HD and replace the file
Oh well, lesson learned :)
UPDATE ProductionServer.dbo.PatientData
SET Name=''
I spent almost three weeks in a constant battle with my network adapter, drivers, router, ISP, and countless other things.
I was convinced web pages would not load. I had reinstalled everything shy of windows itself, I had changed everything, tweeked like 50 things, and it took me months to fix all the things I half broke trying to get my darn internet working.
The problem?
My homepage was Google.ca. For some reason, both IE and Firefox remembered this every time I reinstalled. I of course thought nothing of it, its google, it always up, its reliable... Well, the day before all this happened a friend was over and I was showing him how to make a host block to get NWN to connect to cracked servers without a valid CDkey...
Umm... I had typed google.ca in a fast example of a line to put there...
Guess I had saved it, and shut my PC down before headin to the pub with him that evening.
Funny, next morning my browser didn't work, I hammered the home button all day but even damned google wouldn't load! everything else worked fine!
Two weeks or so later I double clicked a shortcut to some web page that had been sitting on my desktop by mistake... and it loaded up.
I then went out and spent 150 bucks at the pub.
I was backing up all of my files before I formatted my computer. I should have checked to make sure the CD actually wrote instead of believing the computer when it said it was successful. I formatted, then went to put the files back on the computer... and the CD was empty. I lost hundreds of irreplaceable things. PSD documents for my art and photos of my animals and family that I can never get back!
I tried all the tricks that my more computer savvy friends told me and nothing worked.
That's why I am so happy I have a friend who's a certified data recover expert. I've had a few drives that have died on me over the years. But I can understand your loss zenia.
This one is a programming fubar, but it's still tech (I hope :P)
I went a wrote a recursive function that did something like this
function doStuff()
{
if ( ( a && b ) || c )
{
doStuff()
}
}
Now that was what I had put, and was quite stumped as to why it kept hitting an infinite recursion.
I actually disabled the code after an hour of debugging, and came back the next day to look at it. I looked at it for 5 more minutes and realized I had put A AND B not A OR B, which means it passed EVERY time!