What's your worst ever PC disaster?

[nicolasmerritt]

Following on from our article on this...

Whether accidental, self-inflicted, bad-luck or whatever, c'mon, it's time to confess...

[loughor]

I have survived most component failures that have come my way. A graphics card or RAM stick failing is easy enough to replace. For me, it was a PSU failing and killing the motherboard, CPU and a hard disk. Not in themselves a big deal except that I had never backed anything up.

So that was all my email archive, contacts, documents, photos ... gone.

Now I back up essential files weekly. I've reformatted and reloaded without problems many times.

[reload]

So far I've been luck (touch wood). I've managed to avoid disasters. I have lost the odd file before, but nothing major.

All that said, I really do need to sort out a better backup solution. Which I will probably address with an external hard drive now prices are so low.

[webarchitect]

Well I made a boo-boo before when I accidentally dropped the harddrive of my Mom's PC in the office. She works for the government you see, and the PC contained quite a lot of health information on employees. She asked me to clean up the insides of the PC, because it was dirty and the wires were cramping up the space for the RAM.

Well anyways, it took me 2 weeks to recover and rewrite all the lost files. Had to phone some people from a software dev company nearby, ResQSoft, to help me get back the data and modernize the legacy application, since it wasn't working all too well.

[calcio]

And the blatant link farming award goes to...
Still at least it was wrapped up in some form of story I suppose
My worst computer disaster occured when I managed to snap two legs off a brand new stick of RAM and then manage to short my PSU in the space of five minutes.
Expensive mistakes...

[menelaus]

Letting my wife use my main desktop machine and her not shutting it down correctly. Meaning, one corrupt file system and one silent night.

[zacksdaddy]

Originally Posted by loughor

I have survived most component failures that have come my way. A graphics card or RAM stick failing is easy enough to replace. For me, it was a PSU failing and killing the motherboard, CPU and a hard disk. Not in themselves a big deal except that I had never backed anything up.

So that was all my email archive, contacts, documents, photos ... gone.

Now I back up essential files weekly. I've reformatted and reloaded without problems many times.

My psu failed and i took it to a local computer shop. they looked at it and said it was not economic to repair this. the notebook was £800 pounds new pretty high spec and only three years old. i thought it was just a solder job as the computer still worked when on battery untill that went out, any advice anyone oram i just going to have to bite the bullet and buy another laptop.

[gavin]

Was a few weeks ago, had 2 500gb Sata drives running in raid, both bought at same time, same make, same model. Both failed in tandem! Lets say I was less than impressed!

[calcio]

@Gavin - what are the chances of that???? I'd have been fuming - all that trouble to set up RAID drives and they go at the same time.

[lth]

I fired myself across the room by fiddling with the mains power switch on my case many years ago, does that count?