   Who's an idiot?
  Me, that's who!I just bought a 300Gb seagate hard drive this morning and tried to install it and format it to NTFS when it was formatted to FAT32. Lo and behold, it formatted away for an hour or so, and then, right at the end, it died. The whole computer froze.So I thought, "gee, how about trying Partition Magic?" I basically got the same error, but quicker.So, I called up my friend and asked for help and he said to get everything off the hard drive IDE cable except for the hard drive and set it to master and try again.I had 3 hard drives. One was my normal C:, the other was the hard disk from my old computer, only 15Gb, but had all my old files, and then there was the new one.The old hard disk and the new one were on the same IDE cable. And, I realised as I looked into the case, so was my DVD drive. It is a long IDE cable with 3 places to be connected to a device, so I was effectively trying to run 3 devices on a single IDE cable, two of which were definately already to master and slave.Disconnected DVD drive. Perfect, everything worked.So, who's the idiot?? [smile] How about simple and stupid things you guys have done?   
  Last year I "repaired" my notebook's power supply by fixing a broken soldering.Lucky for me the power cord was pretty long so didn't get injured when it exploded after plugging the cord [lol].;  While on a vacation, I'd been working on a project involving several batch operations. One of them involved recursively deleting registry GUID entries in HKCR's CLSID section. While testing, the GUID value somehow became null and all the subkeys were deleted. Needless to say, Windows borked, and a reinstall was necessary.Moral of the story: the registry sucks.   ;  Do i win?Dave   ;  I know someone who dropped a soldering iron(hot) into their PSU. Hilarity ensued.   ;Quote:Original post by etothexI know someone who dropped a soldering iron(hot) into their PSU. Hilarity ensued.Would that someone be you, per chance?   ;Quote:Original post by Programmer OneQuote:Original post by etothexI know someone who dropped a soldering iron(hot) into their PSU. Hilarity ensued.Would that someone be you, per chance?LOL, no, it wasn't me (I swear!!!)My worst computing accident was pretty pathetic, I put a warped CD in the drive and it shattered with such a loud noise that literally I thought the huge P4 heatsink fell off and crunched my Nvidia and every PCI card in the system. :) Fortunately I have a samsung cd-rw 52-52-36x that I absolutely love, I just took the whole thing apart (about 4 screws) and shook all the CD dust out(it was completely pulverized)The drive has performed flawlessly since. I still have to call microsoft and get a replacement disc.   ;  Yeah, I've had the exploding CD thing before at work (as an ICT technician).  It's due to a slight defect in the CD (1 in 10,000 supposedly) and speeds around about those of a 50x or higher CD drive.  As you've found already, the drive isn't the cause of the problem, so you should be fine from now on :)Steve   ;  Have you guys seen that mythbusters episode where they speed the cd's up to make them shatter?   ;  Hahaha, Endar, hell yeah, that was one of my favourite episodes [grin]   