Alright, so I've decided to write a post complaining to anyone who's willing to read about my bad luck with computers in the past two months.

So I'm just sitting in wiz_chat, talking amongst the crowd, when my computer just reboots on me. It starts up, it gets to the loading screen (with the Windows logo), then it reboots again. It repeats this twice, while I stare at it in amazement. So, I go to turn it on once more in Safe Mode. It gets to just before loading MUP.sys, and it reboots again. So, I turn it off, thinking it may just be a really simple problem. I then go to turn it on again. It came on, right? No, wrong. It died. I spent two days without the internet, trying to figure out what was wrong with my computer. At the beginning of the third day, we just took it on down to PCClub and had them test it. We had suspected it was the power supply, but we weren't quite sure. So, the guy plugged in a new power supply, and attempted to turn it on. It came on, right? No, wrong again. It didn't come on, it was just sitting there. Then, he had an idea. He took out my RAM (I have OCZ RAM, 512mb), and put in a lower-end stick of 512mb. He turned it on, and it came on, right? Yes. Haha, fooled you! So that was my first mishap. We ended up buying a new power supply and new RAM, and I'm going to RMA my OCZ RAM. I'm fairly certain I ended up reinstalling Windows, too, but now my memory is a bit fuzzy.

Just a few weeks later, my computer does the same exact thing (the rebooting). So, I turn it off and back on again. It came on, right? Right! After hours of screaming choice words at my computer, I decided that I wasn't going to put up with its crap anymore, so I pulled out my Windows XP CD, put it in, and tried to reinstall, while reformatting my partition. It reinstalled, right? NO. It got to just after reformatting my partition, when it threw up an error about a problem with my partition. This made me mad, and I then had a sense of being helpless. Finally, I decided to try the recovery console, which I had never tried before because I've always been told that it's worth less than this empty water bottle that I have sitting on my desk. So I start it up, and it detects my Windows installation. "SHEISSE MOTSAVI KAVAI!" (Spelling may not be correct, but that's how it sounded) I exclaimed, as I started at it while it displayed all of the installations of Windows on the hard drive. I nearly broke down crying, in addition to the earlier exclamation. So, I select the one and only Windows installation I have.

C:
dir /p

Yet again, I exclaimed: "SCHEISSE MOTSAVI KAVAI!" Everything was still there. So, I went over to my D: drive, where I keep all of my BYOND Projects, along with other projects that I have going on outside of BYOND. So, I did a simple reformat of C: (it took a good ~30 minutes), and then tried to reinstall Windows. It worked, right? Right. And that is my second mishap.

The third was much worse, as the computer that was the victim wasn't mine. This time, it was HyperBYOND. For those that are wondering why I was even able to do this stuff, it's because I am (or was, probably. >_>) the HostServer guy. I'm writing my own version of Dantom's HostServer, and I needed to test what I had so far. So I use useradd to set up byond_hostserver in /var/byond. Then I cd ~byond_hostserver, and I do a nice dir. This is when I remembered that all users were created with a skeleton setup. So, I go to remove it all. So, I use the command 'rm' to remove everything in the directory:

rm -rf */

After it appeared to have finished, I attempted to get into the HostServer user. su byond_hostserver. ERROR: su not found (or something like that). At this point, I'm worrying, but I'm trying to keep my cool, so I 'exit' back into my user. Out of an act of desperation, I tried to use sudo. 'sudo su byond_hostserver.' ERROR: sudo not found. At this time, I think (Well, hope) that it's PuTTy manipulating the messages, because there's no way it can't be found. So, I 'exit' out once more, and try to get back in. ERROR: Connection refused. WTF? So, I try my e-mail. HyperBYOND hosts my mailserver, my nameservers, and my website. Out of all of these, the nameservers worked. Every time I visited my website, I'd get an internal error. So, I wait a few minutes, then I remembered that HyperBYOND was also hosting AChat, Domini, Plunder Gnome, Chatty, and NUChat. To my surprise, all of these worked. So, I e-mailed support and asked them to reboot it, because it stopped working. A good two or three hours later, Ian (King GunnerBlast) got on MSN. "What did you do? Grub is totally 'farked'." So, I explained the story to him, and asked him how it happened. Quote: "someone probably did rm -rf /* instead of */." At this point, I'm thinking: "Oh god. :'(" So I explain to him that I had just tried to do rm -rf */. He then explains that everyone has done it now, including him, and that they're going to end up reformatting the hard drive, and says that he can recover old files, so I asked him to backup /etc/bind/sites_db, /etc/bind/sites_e, /etc/bind.sites_db, /etc/bind/.sites_e. He says alright, then logs out. So, it's a lose-win situation. I reformatted some of the HyperBYOND Machine, but the BIND configuration files that I care about are being retrieved.