What your worst WHOOPS! or DOH! momment while working on a computer?

[kishy]

My biggest "whoops" was probably the Dell "ATX" power supply installed in a generic case with an ASUS P2B motherboard.

The first and only time I've seen electronics spontaneously combust.

 

[k2x4b524[]

My biggie, i dunno if i've already posted or not.. 2 screw-ups same mother board
Asus A7V133 The most robust Motherboard made I SWEAR

Some of you may remember the hack the voltage regulator to get more volts out of this board.
I was running a duron 750 @ 1100 quite happily, but it was needy of more power, so i went scotty on the regulator
Seared 2 of the surface mounts right off the regulator board, Dog walked up and just happened to bump my arm right as i was on the solder joint. Was able to take some surface mounts of my VooDoo 5 - 5500, which didn't mind having less resistance, i still have that card, still plugging away in a K62-450 @ 575 A week later i had gotten my first 2.88mb floppy drive and a decent supply of disks.

See Below

I had gotten a 2.88mb floppy drive, a mitsubishi, no power connector on the drive, so i hacked a power supply lead to get the volts it needed, hacked the cable properly, BUT forgot to snip the wires so they didn't connect to the motherboard, so i turned it on, drive got power, and you could see the glow of melting floppy cable run to the motherboard, which emitted a little smoke. Floppy controller in chipset blew out. literally, left a tiny hole in the chipset. Board still worked though, served loyally until i got a newer one

 

[Rick Ethridge]

I blew two TRS-80 green-screen monitors by not watching where the cables intersected the tube yoke. It sounded like a cat hissing. I blew a K6-2+ 500 by incorrectly setting jumpers. I know about the Apple ][e drive controller boo boo. Last, but not least, was backward installing an ATX power connector. At least no damage was done to the system.

 

[SteveH]

Ah, yes, I made a similar mistake at the Windows Command line and managed to delete every track in my 18 GB MP3 collection with a "2" in the filename. And had no backup of course.

OK, so this wasn't me but an engineer colleague back in the late 80s. He'd gone to check a customers LSI-M4 system (UK 8/16-bit system consisting of built-in screen, 8" floppy + rodime hard disk). He performed some tests and decided to try reformatting the HD. However, he got kicked out of the office as the customer wanted to lock up and go to lunch. When he returned an hour or so later the office was already open so he just got on with formatting the HD.

Then... the customer came back in and told the engineer he had moved the faulty system into the office next door and brought the other working system back into his office so he could get on with some work! Ouch!