The fun part is that I’ve actually done the “delete the bootloader” on purpose. We did it for operating systems class and then manually did the disk partition calculations to directly write a new bootloader into place. Once you’ve done that a few times you start to really really understand how the superblock, bootloader, and partitions work.
One thing I miss from Reddit is that all this software/hardware supremacy bullshit died out years ago.
I’m so fucking sick of these memes
Never visited r/linuxmemes?
I have no beef with folks circle jerking in their own space, go for it. But having it constantly hammered in my feed is just annoying and toxic. May as well get in arguments about whose dad could beat up whose.
Bad time for a typo. Can’t*
Thank you corrected it
Story time: In 1994 my friends dad still had a PC running DOS/Windows 3.1
My friend and I had been downloading pron clips from a local BBS that were all in a *.dl file format.
My friend got anxious his father would find the porn and he would get in trouble, so in a command line for DOS, he typed:
C:\> del *.dlWhich the computer read as
del *.dl*which meant within seconds it was deleting every Dynamic Link Library on the PC, and in short order it crashed and then would not boot.So yes, especially in older Windows systems, you could delete all kinds of shit to bork it.
Task failed successfully
This joke is explained with a story by Neal Stephenson in his “The Hole Hawg of Operating systems”. It’s a short, but great read: http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
To quote:
“But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner’s product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user’s failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.”
Like a review of the OG Dodge Viper:
“Traction control? Air bags? Nope. You get ten cylinders, four wheels, and a steering wheel. Whatever happens next, it’s on you.”
Edit: Here it is
I knew what channel that was gonna be before I even clicked the link lol
ddstands for disk destroyer.It’s a true Unix tool: it does one thing really well and it’s up to the user to not fuck it up. Always double check the if= and of= before you hit enter on a dd! That’s how power works and I’d rather have power over my computer than have it be the other way around.
Yes, I’ve fucked up a few dd commands over the years. Lessons learned.
Yep, this was me a few weeks ago. I was running widows and linux dualboot on separate hard drives. I decided to reformat the windows drive since I was never using it. Apparently I had installed the bootloader to the drive which windows was on…
I had a dream the other night that I accidentally deleted the ls command and it broke a bunch of shit on my linux server.
Yet it still booted, and my mdadm raid array was still intact. I had to boot from a live CD to copy the command over.
As someone who knows enough about linux to run a ubuntu file server, but has never contributed to a meaningful open source project in his life, is this something that can actually happen?
Sure. There’s a story around somewhere of someone deleting basically all of /bin and was able to recover the live system
System32 is not the bootloader. You can delete it all day long once you change permissions and unhide it.
deleted by creator
And then there is that one Distro your “hacker” friend uses that turns your disk in to a industrial shredder…
Nothing like disabling the screen in the BIOS/UEFI. Guaranteed adrenaline
It’s going to happen several times a year, regardless you remove or not
