Deadly Experiences (BSoD, RSoD, GSoD, etc.)

[techno_race]

I wanted to hear about your experiences with deadly error messages.
These include: Blue Screens of Death, Rings of Death, Black Screens of Death, Sad Macs, Sad iPods, Yellow Screens of Death, Rows of Bombs, Bombs, Guru Meditations, White Screens of Death, Red Screens of Death, ESoDs and kernel panic.

My experiences heve been only with BSoDs.
Apart from the experiences trying to load Windows 98 drivers into a Windows XP machine, the scariest (and most surprising one) was in my Windows 2000 laptop.

On Christmas 2006, I was copying font files to a 1GB USB thumb drive from my Win2K laptop. Having nothing important on there, therefore not worrying about data loss or corruption, I carelessly unplugged it from the laptop in the middle of the copy. This resulted in an error meassagebox "Please insert a disk into drive E:" or something like that. A few seconds later, I inserted the thumb drive into drive E: (or whatever was on the message; most likely E:). Inserting the disk didn't result in continuing copying, but resulted in a BSoD. Neither the thumb drive nor laptop's files or sectors were damaged or deleted.
Does anyone know what caused this?

P.S. What does ESoD stand for? (WSoD in some newer Verizon phones)

[djr33]

Error Screen of Death?

[Twey]

I once had a kernel panic with the x86_64 Linux Atheros drivers... they hated TCP, I could ping things fine (ping uses ICMP, for those who don't know), and send data out via TCP, but when I tried to receive data, everything died. I couldn't find the problem (part of that driver is closed-source, anyway, due to certain legal problems), and eventually I submitted a bug report and switched back to i686. They're better now, though.

I'm hoping to learn how to develop kernel modules when I have the time, though, so I daresay I'll be seeing a lot more of them soon

[techno_race]

Ouch.

[djr33]

Ironic story, related to this site--
I was playing with a multiboot setup on my machine, and started messing with DOS (well, through the command prompt).
I'll recommend-- DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME
...I did. Didn't work out too well.

I was doing various things with partitions, booting software/defaults/etc., and.. the command prompt.

To make a long story short, I wanted to see what "dynamic" meant for the options for a disk.
In diskpart (partition manager and such), "change" (I think... not looking at the moment) is the command to convert between "basic" and "dynamic" drives. Well, sounded fun. "Dynamic Drive"... like the site.
(At this point, I was fed up with the computer, and it needed to be reformatted anyway, so I wasn't too concerned with messing things up.)
I went through with the change on drive C. And... chaos.
It was so bad it didn't even make it to the blue screen of death. Just to right before the windows prompt, where it... died.
After hours of playing with an install disk and trying to use dos commands through that, I gave up, and started the reformatting process.

This is actually why I haven't been on here much for the last week or so. My PC is now unusable (til I deal with finishing reformatting, and I've been busy), and I'm replacing it anyway, with a new intel-based macbook, so I can run XP and OSX on it at the same time, which will be quite nice for both net stuff and video work. I should have that up and running soon, which will make it more convenient to do net stuff, such as programming related to DD.

What's amusing is how easy it would be, I think, to write a virus based on that. About 6 commands to an unusable computer. But, then again, I hope this doesn't get into the wrong hands. Heh.

[techno_race]

I have to admit, love your sig !

A better place to say that would be here.

[ItsMeOnly]

too many to list, but most destructive?
- No #1 will always be the death of my last PC: quiet, but permanent- it just froze, having nice BOINC manager on screen. The machine booted exactly one month after, with completely new guts (is 75% more powerful than before).
- No #2: cache corruption of my Alphastation, system would work for 2 days, then die.
- No #3: the Institute of Journalism server's PCI bridge corruption, it still works, but headless (in 58th day of uptime now, for some wicked reason it NEVER got to 200th day: either it was 7-hour power outage, a superstorm or 105 deg. F heat- the absolute record was exactly 191 days)...
- No #4: My Indy always freezes when Mozilla finishes loading page- go figure...
- No #5: memorable IRIX crash ("Kernel Panic") when playing with software synthesizer and setting modulation source to modulation target ("long long" would always be too little for the result)...

[techno_race]

Yikes.

[pcbrainbuster]

Just wondering here but can you lot please tell me what the following are EXACTLY -

Virus
Trojan
Trojan Horse
Malware
(if there are more than add please and thank you)

I know in one way what they are but need to know more specificly the difference...

[techno_race]

Virus - something bad? (I haven't figured it out yet)
Trojan & Trojan Horse are the same thing. It's a program that does what it says it does AND dumps harmful things into your computer. An example is WeatherBug.
Spyware - Things like keyloggers that harm your computer and tend to harm you as well with thinks like stealing credit card numbers, passwords, etc. like GuardBar, etc.
Adware - Software that pops up ads. A perfect example is WhenU SaveNow!.
Malware - A very broad term for all of the above.
Hope this helps.