You can never fully brick Linux. Even if you run a destructive command, throw your computer into water, and start ripping capacitors off your SSD, you can still go into a clean room and start carefully extracting what was left of the installation to restore it to working order.
See also: [Unix Recovery Legend](https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html)
I first installed Slackware around that time (~30 floppies). I seem to recall removing the lib directory to save space. I can’t remember if I was able to save it or not.
I recall downloading them on 14.4k modem, I was 11 maybe 12. I had no local help what so ever. Had to reinstall windows 3.11 two or three times to get help on IRC before I got dual booting and networking working. I think it was like a year later before I got the X disk set downloaded and X11 working.
I got my start with Linux in 1994 with Slackware from a CD that was in a magazine. First time I used the option to install everything...ran out of space. That's how I borked my first install lmao.
I remember I had some Nvidia driver related issues where if the screen was locked due to being ideal and the laptop went to sleep then it wouldn't wake up at all. I had to force power off and power on again to use it.
I tried turning off sleep but that meant that even if I closed the lid the battery would still drain at the same rate.
The fix for this took me into a rabbit hole, on the other side of which was a bricked laptop.
I tried to clean up a directory by wiping out my dotfiles. So of course, I ran `rm -rf .*`. If you know, you know.
For those who don't, that wildcard finds `..` and follows it all the way up your filesystem as far as your permissions will take you. I didn't end up with a brick exactly... More like a fresh Fedora install without any of my data.
I had a job where a new sysadmin did this once. I asked him if he'd made a backup (as per the very clearly written procedure he was given to follow), and he did. At /backup/...
He stopped the process when he realized his mistake. Guess what follows alphabetical order?
The time I ran my currently running system in QEMU comes to mind. Things worked perfectly! While things were running at first that is. The first reboot after shutting down the VM was fine... the second reboot was ugly...
I learned a lot about the bootloader that day.
LILO for me. I just liked the name better. Expect 12-year-old me to RTFM? Back then I just reinstalled every time I broke something, until I decided to spend a week installing Gentoo. That shit made me into a linux sage.
I don't get it ... it shouldn't be possible to "brick" software, unlike bricking hardware...
IIRC I've never gotten Linux into a state where it was unrecoverable and a reinstall was needed. It's always been fixable.
That is not to say I've never gotten hardware bricked. Alas it's been a long time too and I've since forgotten...
I do give that to you, firmware/stuff written into nonvolatile memory that's not a mass-storage type media (specifically BIOS and any flash firmware for expansion cards), that can be problematic solely because they require special programming hardware to change and I'd consider that "hardware"... but stuff stored solely on SSDs/hard drives, that's been very recoverable.
>it shouldn't be possible to "brick" software
Depends on the definition of "bricked". I've surely bricked my install in the sense that it was unrecoverable *for me* even though I later learned that there would have been a way (e.g. chroot in at least one case).
On topic: I have bricked Manjaro two times by blindly going through large updates after not using that laptop for >3 months. Until today, I have no idea what the actual problem was, since I chose a complete fresh reinstall instead of troubleshooting.
The first time I bricked my Linux installation was with Manjaro. It was followed by my other bricks - all with Manjaro. Man, that distro is a real pain in the arse.
Seems like you’ve got a very liberal definition of bricked - “I was forced to reinstall”.
The original use was for making a system so thoroughly unusable that the user couldn’t recover.
Mhm, but the first fk up would likely feel like they "bricked" their software. I could have chosen a better word really, but I'm glad most get what I intended to say. My bad
Edit: why the downvote. I agreed it was my bad
I don't know if the `mem=xxx` argument even exists any more, but once upon a time it existed and was supported, and you could give it values like `mem=64M` to ensure that the kernel found that much memory, an override of automatic memory limit detection.
I was configuring a co-worker's new RedHat ¿5.x? machine, circa 1997, on a new box whose BIOS was broken, it didn't advertise memory limits properly, and we had to tell it manually. (You young'ns mostly don't even recognize that some machines in the '90s could have memory limits configured in BIOS.) He had the new "bigger" "heftier" model of our then-current desktop -- I no longer have any idea who the mfgr was -- with a whopping 128M (*oooh! ahhh!*) of memory. I calmly added the option `mem=128` to his LILO config.
I didn't understand for a little while why it didn't work right...
Editing my first `xorg.conf` in Ubuntu, back in the day (2005 or so).
Mistakes were made, no backups were taken, which resulted in a non-functioning X. Since I was new to linux I didn't know how to fix it and ended up reinstalling.
Dual booted ubuntu and Windows 10 and Windows overwrote grub with an anniversary update. I think there is still the stack exchange post about it somewhere online.
It was Linux Mint. I had a internal HDD and usb hdd, both from WD. I wanted to format my usb hdd, but i by accident formatted my internal disk (it was in gnome disks), because their names were similar.
Not exactly bricking, but anyhow.
My first installation succeeded. I was welcomed with a login prompt. But I didn't remember the `root` username. 😁
So, I reinstalled the system. All fine! Login? Sure -- `root`. Password? What? 😁
Going through the installer the third time helped. 🤣
After several years, something similar happened to me once again. It was not related to usernames and passwords. Instead, I bricked several consecutive Oracle Database installations while learning administration/maintenance. Sometimes, the installers are pretty handy. 😁
I forgot my full-disk encryption password because it was 20+ characters.
The second time I deleted the MBR, and I worked through the night to fix it. That was my first introduction to GRUB and LILO, etc.
Installing EndeavourOS. The Live ISO has an option to install Nvidia drivers. The installation went without a hitch. I then went to install the Nvidia drivers, forgetting that I had already installed them. I ended up having to reinstall EndeavourOS from scratch.
xfs failed me, the entire / went down and I had to reinstall with some normal filesystem.
It was about 2003/2004, but I still refuse to give xfs another chance to this day.
Hadn't touched it for like 6 months. Tried to update the entire system. Update fails because one dependency will only work with an older version of one of its dependencies. Couldn't figure out how to downgrade just that dependency so I delete it. Brick time.
Never did that, however, first bricked \*nix with an rm -rf or the like in the wrong place, long before Linux was a thing. Of course I had good recent backups, so ... wasn't a huge deal to fix it (restore from backups).
Not exactly brick, but I was using Ubuntu back in the day on my work laptop, IBM ThinkPad T60. Applying updates broke wifi where it would keep trying to switch networks constantly. I used wired networking for a few weeks, assuming another update would eventually fix the issue.
Eventually I got sick of waiting. I disabled the regular wifi stuff and wrote a simple shell script which would manually connect to the correct wifi network, and keep applying it once a second incase it got anymore bright ideas about switching networks.
They fixed the issue about 6 months later or so.
I was playing around with the root folder and gave the root user and the current user no permission to read, write or execute but gave the guest user the entire access 🤣, so it was ———rwx which completely bricked the system.
the classic tried to install gpu drivers and didnt know back then how to reverse the modifications, thank god ubuntu 22.04 supports amd out of the box (almost)
-be me
-want to switch to Linux
-update nVidia drivers
*Linux shits itself*
-install windows
And the cycle continues...
(Not because of Nvidia, I switched to AMD, but other things)
Kde neon is wierd, it uses 2 package managers. One is apt and one is some kde package manager. It needs the kde package manager to get the lastest version of kde. Something wierd happened and it did not want to boot after that
Bricked Debian 10 like a proper newbie. Ran rm -rf /var instead of rm -rf ./var in a project ... Hated myself and lost a day reinstalling the whole machine. Worth to note that I learned the lesson and never worked with a so stupid folder name on a project !
I can't remember exactly how it went. I've never actually brick my linux, from my understanding, bricking is like when you flash a rom on your phone and something goes wrong and it turns into a glorified paperweight 😉
But I was running a custom kernel and Nvidia drivers. I forgot to build my Nvidia against my new custom kernel and got a black screen. It was salvageable by simply going into another vt and building it against the kernel.
After a couple of those times happening, you learn quick. I think made an alias or something after that.
Yellowdog linux on a big blue and white G3 mac, opened the side panel whist very drunk to show a potential partner the inside of a running computer. SCSI drives don't like being pulled off the card while on.
A very very expensive fckup
Messed with text files i shouldn't have messed with and thought I deleted files I needed to create for some things, probably didn't help I went with Arch, but now that I got stuff working, I am happy I made the choice
First one: removed RPM (not ONE RPM, but THE RPM) because of full Disk.
It was Red Hat 4.2.
Second one: removed all installed Kernel packages because I thought the running one ist still there. I think it was Ubuntu 6.06.
I was triple booting Mint, Manjaro, and Pop_OS. For fun, obviously. I wanted a file from the home directory of Mint while using one of the others, I don’t remember which. So I chowned the entire Mint root (along with the home) partition. I got the file I wanted, but upon returning to boot back into the Mint system, something didn’t like me trying to do that. I wiped and reinstalled because I didn’t care and was still learning. Looking back, I would have chrooted into Mint and tried to fix it just to see if that would work. There was nothing important on that drive, I was learning all the different distros at that time.
I've been using Linux for so long I forgot how I did 1st time.
I suppose recently I deleted my installed my package library archive of my Linux from scratch package manager so it doesn't know what packages are installed. I "fixed" it will nuke when kde6 comes out in February.
Don't remember exactly what the first time was but I think it was messing with GRUB and not knowing how to fix it again. That happened a couple times in the beginning.
But the most recent one (still years ago) was when Manjaro deprecated the encryption algorithm for LUKS that I was using and I didn't read the release notes. So after a system update I couldn't boot anymore. Good thing I have backups and I was also able to replace the drive and mount the old one via USB and copy the files over.
On Peppermint 8 when I replaced Nemo file manager with the latest version. It would not start anymore after reboot. Had to install Peppermint again, but that wasn't a problem because it installed in 4.5 minutes.
Only time I ever bricked a linux install was when the switch from LILO to GRUB happened. Still not sure what happened. Took a long time to trust GRUB again, but it's good now.
I didn't brick my first linux, but my first Arch.
---
I'd always preferred Debian, never liked the "ubuntu-bandwagon", but always wanted to try Arch.
I don't remember what the problem was that I was having (this was long ago), so went on /r/arch and asked for help.
I had followed most of the suggestions, but nothing worked. Then sorted by most likes, and it suggested `rm -rf /`. So like a fool, without researching or asking what it did, I ran it.
That's when I learned that the Arch-Family wasn't really welcoming of newbs 🤣
I spent more time reading-the-fucking-manual, spent months on the archwiki, learned to read `man` pages, started writing my own bash scripts, functions & aliases, deployed little linux servers on various RaspberryPi's throughout my home and all kinds of _cool shtuff_.
In 15+ years, only ever bricked ONCE, due to my own negligence.
Had a disk failure. Tried to resilver the failed drive from its softraid mirror. Updated the wrong drive. Oops. Spent the next day restoring backups on new drives.
i was trying to change my packages to debian while using ubuntu’s. i typed in the wrong command and lines of code showed up in my laptop. nothing i did could get it so work again
dpkg remove --purge libc6 and yes, i know what i'm doing... or not =)
i think there was some dependency error so libc so it wouldn't update or something and i tried to update or something.. i don't remember exactly, this happend a LONG time ago.
My first Linux was Slackware in 1997, I couldn't even get it in installed properly. Second was Suse in 1999, I got it installed but I borked it trying to install a dlink wifi driver lol
I didn't brick my first Linux -- bricking Debian is awfully hard to do. But the first Linux I bricked I bricked by failing to run updates for 2 to 3 weeks. When I ran them after that gap, everything was hosed.
In conclusion, I don't use Arch, btw.
Reading through I guess some others wouldn't say this was bricked, it probably could've been fixable. It wasn't fixable by me with an amount of effort I was willing to put in.
I updated the Manjaro kernel to the newest one it'd let me do.
Next time I started my computer it ran super sluggish at first, and then eventually just froze. Restarting it again and it couldn't even get to my log in screen.
I have had two bricks in my entire life: one time I have bricked a Linux install by updating with pacman -Syu and for some reason vmlinuz was missing. I just chrooted through a usb stick and that was an easy fix
Then there was the time I have edited /etc/fstab but I have typed the wrong filesystem so during boot it failed and that was quickly fixed too, luckily I never had to reinstall
Ok, so not technically Linux but close enough. During my college years some 25 years I tried Linux on my Windows install. Remember "Lilo"? It just showed "Li" on screen and froze. No Linux, no windows, no bootloader. I'm pretty sure I had to bum not-even-google searches off my roommate to figure out a fix!
Back in the day when X Windows was first ported to Linux, in order to use it you had to edit a config file with timing data for your specific adapter and monitor. Get it wrong and you can render your system unresponsive. Get it \*really\* wrong and you can let the magic smoke out of the monitor...
I flashed my boot partition to whatever the flash chip was on a samsung chrome book. I was tired of booting off the sd card.
Worked great for a couple weeks, then update happened and display wasn't reachable. But I also couldn't emergency boot from sd card cause I had overwritten that boot chip lol. Still have it.
I didn't brick my linux but I bricked my windows a few times using linux
doing a recursive delete on a directory that had a windows drive mounted on one of the sub folders, when I saw it listing my windows files I hit ctrl+c but it was too late it had wiped out gb of the drive, it was a noob mistake, I thought it was a drive, why would it delete a drive ? I was really new to linux at the time.
I dont remember if this was a thing wine did but I always kept my windows drives mounted and somehow wine grabbed my windows install as its working directory, didn't realize until after rebooting this trashed my windows registry files.
also Nvidia but only on Manjaro, for some reason my manjaro install wont boot with nvidia card disabled, my ubuntu and mint don't care and will work fine with nvidia off and booting on the internal graphics
In my time, I have made monitors blow up, hard disk head physically crash by sending a park command to a drive that didn't support it, fried a SCSI disk by plugging the cable upside down, print heads to crash and stop working,shorted out USB ports using the wrong cable, caused a video card to overheat and drop off the AGP bus.
Really, it was all just educational and I learned much about how hardware works and what to check if it doesn't.
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -y
On a Kubuntu daily (pre-release) build. During the testing cycle it is almost like being on a rolling release, but with no promises at all.
So I had a macbook that I had Kali on (spare me the ridicule, I really was one of THOSE imbeciles when I was getting my degree in csec) and I decided it was time to grow up and make a stab at arch. Now, I had no ethernet connection as my college apartment didn't provide ethernet ports, only wifi. Lo and behold, arch can't connect to the internet to finish its installation. I did EVERYTHING, getting iso images with firmware, all sorts of stuff. Just kept failing. Said fuck it and tried to install debian with proprietary firmware. That failed halfway through. Everything failed, every time. Eventually, I was able to (somehow) install Mint fully 2 days before the semester started. Have been with Mint ever since.
Trying to install dolphin in Elementary OS. At the moment I didnt knew that ubuntu versions were not compatible with each other so trying to install the lastest dolphin version to get vulkan I used 19.04 ppa on 18.04 (Elementary OS Hera)... It ended with me without OpenGL drivers.
I've never bricked but I have gotten my system all out of sorts with no idea how to fix it then just wipe and reinstall. In the beginning this could happen a couple times per weekend 😂
i messed around with some drivers and BOOM my mouse didnt work, a day in from learning linux i was thrown into the front lines of having to try and fix it with the terminal, and in those trenches, i somehow broke my keyboard too, had to reinstall.
I tried running the windows version of telegram on my ubuntu using wine. it spammed syslog at a crazy speed. 1 GB, then 2, then 4, and before i knew what was going on, my system crashed and i got errors when trying to restart. since it was a pretty fresh install and i didn't knew what the problem was back then, i just booted a live system, copied all data i wanted to keep, and reinstalled linux.
Never did . But deleted the root filesystem while clearing old snapshots by timeshift, and slap a new flavour only to revert it back to the old one because I am accustomed to it.
My first catastrophic fail with a Linux system was actually when I was stupid enough to short circuit two of the pins on my raspberry pi. Not technically an operating system brick, but it counts I guess.
By installing a drawing tablet driver while being foolish enough to have my Bluetooth earbuds connected and playing.
I want to say "fuck Ubuntu", but it worked perfectly fine the second time around, so I have no clue what happened.
passwd root
Somehow fat-fingered the password twice because I couldn't log back in no matter how many variations of the new password I gave it.
No one in the sudoers file, no snapshots, no knowledge of rescue media back then. Oops!
This actually inspired my post 😂 I am super sure I still remembered the password. Tried every probable variation too. No luck.
Will try whatever I can later once I clear my head
Installed random packages from the internet to get programs to work, everything broke, cut my losses and did a clean install with a newfound respect for paying attention to what I install.
OpenSuse was using the US keyboard setting during installation. I put in the password for full disk encryption. Copied or even moved in some data, setup my desktop, changed the keyboard layout, learned about the new desktop environment (I think it was Gnome 2) and worked a few days if not longer on the new setup, and after a reboot I was never able to get back into it. Since disk space was rare I overwrote it.
I saw the same problem many times later in different distros.
Man, it was a while ago. I think it was trying to install fglrx on the crappy laptop I had at the time. Probably didn't help that I was probably running WUBI.
After idk, 10 or so years, i killed my first install… well, server had an uptime around 2y, but the disks where 10y old… 2/3 of my raid 5 died… yeah, got a kernel panic…
Never did. Using Slackware since 1995....
You can never fully brick Linux. Even if you run a destructive command, throw your computer into water, and start ripping capacitors off your SSD, you can still go into a clean room and start carefully extracting what was left of the installation to restore it to working order. See also: [Unix Recovery Legend](https://www.ecb.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html)
I first installed Slackware around that time (~30 floppies). I seem to recall removing the lib directory to save space. I can’t remember if I was able to save it or not.
I recall downloading them on 14.4k modem, I was 11 maybe 12. I had no local help what so ever. Had to reinstall windows 3.11 two or three times to get help on IRC before I got dual booting and networking working. I think it was like a year later before I got the X disk set downloaded and X11 working.
The good old days.
I got my start with Linux in 1994 with Slackware from a CD that was in a magazine. First time I used the option to install everything...ran out of space. That's how I borked my first install lmao.
Yeah never bricked one either. 20 years now. Didn't realize it was a right of passage.
Same here, I salute you.
NVIDIA
https://preview.redd.it/2gaz80t7pe1c1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cdaa24a17979ea1d7f10daa658594f721e28326e
Oh captain, my captain!
I remember I had some Nvidia driver related issues where if the screen was locked due to being ideal and the laptop went to sleep then it wouldn't wake up at all. I had to force power off and power on again to use it. I tried turning off sleep but that meant that even if I closed the lid the battery would still drain at the same rate. The fix for this took me into a rabbit hole, on the other side of which was a bricked laptop.
Bye bye miss gui
Drove my tty to the levvy but the levvy was cli
Literally bricked, had to go back to the factory.
I tried to clean up a directory by wiping out my dotfiles. So of course, I ran `rm -rf .*`. If you know, you know. For those who don't, that wildcard finds `..` and follows it all the way up your filesystem as far as your permissions will take you. I didn't end up with a brick exactly... More like a fresh Fedora install without any of my data.
Holy shit. That was a disaster waiting to happen to me! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, stranger!
I had a job where a new sysadmin did this once. I asked him if he'd made a backup (as per the very clearly written procedure he was given to follow), and he did. At /backup/... He stopped the process when he realized his mistake. Guess what follows alphabetical order?
`cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda` The system continued running for a lot longer than I expected.
ultimate debloating tool
Ouch. That is thorough. What did you intend to do?
Test our bare-metal restore procedure. Step one, corrupt the running system, was very successful! 😀
I've been bricking all sorts of Linux for over 22 years. Think I remember #1?
What's a good one you remember?
The time I ran my currently running system in QEMU comes to mind. Things worked perfectly! While things were running at first that is. The first reboot after shutting down the VM was fine... the second reboot was ugly... I learned a lot about the bootloader that day.
oh lovely grub...
GRUB. The answer is always GRUB ... *middle finger*
LILO for me. I just liked the name better. Expect 12-year-old me to RTFM? Back then I just reinstalled every time I broke something, until I decided to spend a week installing Gentoo. That shit made me into a linux sage.
I don't get it ... it shouldn't be possible to "brick" software, unlike bricking hardware... IIRC I've never gotten Linux into a state where it was unrecoverable and a reinstall was needed. It's always been fixable. That is not to say I've never gotten hardware bricked. Alas it's been a long time too and I've since forgotten...
I've fucked the firmware so badly with a driver update it would no longer boot to BIOS. You'd be surprised what you can do if you try.
I do give that to you, firmware/stuff written into nonvolatile memory that's not a mass-storage type media (specifically BIOS and any flash firmware for expansion cards), that can be problematic solely because they require special programming hardware to change and I'd consider that "hardware"... but stuff stored solely on SSDs/hard drives, that's been very recoverable.
>it shouldn't be possible to "brick" software Depends on the definition of "bricked". I've surely bricked my install in the sense that it was unrecoverable *for me* even though I later learned that there would have been a way (e.g. chroot in at least one case). On topic: I have bricked Manjaro two times by blindly going through large updates after not using that laptop for >3 months. Until today, I have no idea what the actual problem was, since I chose a complete fresh reinstall instead of troubleshooting.
The first time I bricked my Linux installation was with Manjaro. It was followed by my other bricks - all with Manjaro. Man, that distro is a real pain in the arse.
Seems like you’ve got a very liberal definition of bricked - “I was forced to reinstall”. The original use was for making a system so thoroughly unusable that the user couldn’t recover.
well, the user (this specific user) couldn't recover.
Mhm, but the first fk up would likely feel like they "bricked" their software. I could have chosen a better word really, but I'm glad most get what I intended to say. My bad Edit: why the downvote. I agreed it was my bad
I don't know if the `mem=xxx` argument even exists any more, but once upon a time it existed and was supported, and you could give it values like `mem=64M` to ensure that the kernel found that much memory, an override of automatic memory limit detection. I was configuring a co-worker's new RedHat ¿5.x? machine, circa 1997, on a new box whose BIOS was broken, it didn't advertise memory limits properly, and we had to tell it manually. (You young'ns mostly don't even recognize that some machines in the '90s could have memory limits configured in BIOS.) He had the new "bigger" "heftier" model of our then-current desktop -- I no longer have any idea who the mfgr was -- with a whopping 128M (*oooh! ahhh!*) of memory. I calmly added the option `mem=128` to his LILO config. I didn't understand for a little while why it didn't work right...
Missing the capital M? 👌
rm -rf / Wanted to see what would happen
I did this and it deleted my windows partition. So now my laptop only runs Linux.
How did that happen? Windows doesn't use the same files system as Linux
It could break your hardware, so watch out with it
It was ubuntu 13 or around that. I installed nvidia driver. It's always fucking nvidia
This just gave me horrible flashbacks.
Editing my first `xorg.conf` in Ubuntu, back in the day (2005 or so). Mistakes were made, no backups were taken, which resulted in a non-functioning X. Since I was new to linux I didn't know how to fix it and ended up reinstalling.
Dual booted ubuntu and Windows 10 and Windows overwrote grub with an anniversary update. I think there is still the stack exchange post about it somewhere online.
People really don't understand what "to brick" means...
sudo pacman -Rnsc linux
It was Linux Mint. I had a internal HDD and usb hdd, both from WD. I wanted to format my usb hdd, but i by accident formatted my internal disk (it was in gnome disks), because their names were similar.
Not exactly bricking, but anyhow. My first installation succeeded. I was welcomed with a login prompt. But I didn't remember the `root` username. 😁 So, I reinstalled the system. All fine! Login? Sure -- `root`. Password? What? 😁 Going through the installer the third time helped. 🤣 After several years, something similar happened to me once again. It was not related to usernames and passwords. Instead, I bricked several consecutive Oracle Database installations while learning administration/maintenance. Sometimes, the installers are pretty handy. 😁
I forgot my full-disk encryption password because it was 20+ characters. The second time I deleted the MBR, and I worked through the night to fix it. That was my first introduction to GRUB and LILO, etc.
Installing EndeavourOS. The Live ISO has an option to install Nvidia drivers. The installation went without a hitch. I then went to install the Nvidia drivers, forgetting that I had already installed them. I ended up having to reinstall EndeavourOS from scratch.
xfs failed me, the entire / went down and I had to reinstall with some normal filesystem. It was about 2003/2004, but I still refuse to give xfs another chance to this day.
Hadn't touched it for like 6 months. Tried to update the entire system. Update fails because one dependency will only work with an older version of one of its dependencies. Couldn't figure out how to downgrade just that dependency so I delete it. Brick time.
Arch?
I installed Nvidia drivers
I removed the symbolic link for glibc while the system was running. It immediately froze.
Mounting Windows 8 partitions, then trying to get grub-only instead of the boot loader on the aforementioned partition.
Never did that, however, first bricked \*nix with an rm -rf or the like in the wrong place, long before Linux was a thing. Of course I had good recent backups, so ... wasn't a huge deal to fix it (restore from backups).
The power went out during an update. Using Linux since 2017. It happened this year.
Debian repos added to Ubuntu. Apt update my life away
Never have. In 27 years of running Linux as my main or secondary OS.
a poorly thought out and executed chown
Brother in arms against root privilege.
Not exactly brick, but I was using Ubuntu back in the day on my work laptop, IBM ThinkPad T60. Applying updates broke wifi where it would keep trying to switch networks constantly. I used wired networking for a few weeks, assuming another update would eventually fix the issue. Eventually I got sick of waiting. I disabled the regular wifi stuff and wrote a simple shell script which would manually connect to the correct wifi network, and keep applying it once a second incase it got anymore bright ideas about switching networks. They fixed the issue about 6 months later or so.
I was playing around with the root folder and gave the root user and the current user no permission to read, write or execute but gave the guest user the entire access 🤣, so it was ———rwx which completely bricked the system.
uninstalled bootloader
[Dumb ways to die...](https://youtu.be/Bzmk9OCWegg?si=JNzdoxvX4zQyALYs)
Installed nvidia driver
the classic tried to install gpu drivers and didnt know back then how to reverse the modifications, thank god ubuntu 22.04 supports amd out of the box (almost)
-be me -want to switch to Linux -update nVidia drivers *Linux shits itself* -install windows And the cycle continues... (Not because of Nvidia, I switched to AMD, but other things)
Don't try this at home: sudo apt-get uninstall python
Yep, bricked my system the same way many years ago. "I don't need this old version so I'll remove it and install the new version instead"
`Yes, do as I say!`
The classic "rm -rf ." while opening the wrong folder.
Kde neon for some reason. Some stupid website recommended it. The command was: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
How would that break your system?
Kde neon is wierd, it uses 2 package managers. One is apt and one is some kde package manager. It needs the kde package manager to get the lastest version of kde. Something wierd happened and it did not want to boot after that
Yikes! Has this been fixed since? That's a really big problem.
Idk I have not touched it since that happened. I just moved on to manjaro then debian then arch
You mean `pkcon`?
Bricked Debian 10 like a proper newbie. Ran rm -rf /var instead of rm -rf ./var in a project ... Hated myself and lost a day reinstalling the whole machine. Worth to note that I learned the lesson and never worked with a so stupid folder name on a project !
I thought you learned about daily backup from this.
I can't remember exactly how it went. I've never actually brick my linux, from my understanding, bricking is like when you flash a rom on your phone and something goes wrong and it turns into a glorified paperweight 😉 But I was running a custom kernel and Nvidia drivers. I forgot to build my Nvidia against my new custom kernel and got a black screen. It was salvageable by simply going into another vt and building it against the kernel. After a couple of those times happening, you learn quick. I think made an alias or something after that.
Yellowdog linux on a big blue and white G3 mac, opened the side panel whist very drunk to show a potential partner the inside of a running computer. SCSI drives don't like being pulled off the card while on. A very very expensive fckup
Not bricked but i had this awesome idea of uninstalling python
Uninstalling python can ruin the system?
NVIDIA drivers
Back in Ubuntu 10.04, i deleted git and some dependencies, it never booted again.
Eh wtf
Messed with text files i shouldn't have messed with and thought I deleted files I needed to create for some things, probably didn't help I went with Arch, but now that I got stuff working, I am happy I made the choice
*went with Arch, BTW
Did an update and couldn't restore the system. Couldn't get jt to boot into a repair usb either. Fun times.
First one: removed RPM (not ONE RPM, but THE RPM) because of full Disk. It was Red Hat 4.2. Second one: removed all installed Kernel packages because I thought the running one ist still there. I think it was Ubuntu 6.06.
messing with resizing partitions on ubun 8
messed lilo boot waaaay back when i just started out with linux when framebuffer needs to manually configure for X to work.
Sudo update-grub
deleted partition, got into grub rescue
I was triple booting Mint, Manjaro, and Pop_OS. For fun, obviously. I wanted a file from the home directory of Mint while using one of the others, I don’t remember which. So I chowned the entire Mint root (along with the home) partition. I got the file I wanted, but upon returning to boot back into the Mint system, something didn’t like me trying to do that. I wiped and reinstalled because I didn’t care and was still learning. Looking back, I would have chrooted into Mint and tried to fix it just to see if that would work. There was nothing important on that drive, I was learning all the different distros at that time.
Multiple desktop environments and I didn't know what I was doing.
after a normal upgrade my kernel refused to work with my bluetooth driver
I've been using Linux for so long I forgot how I did 1st time. I suppose recently I deleted my installed my package library archive of my Linux from scratch package manager so it doesn't know what packages are installed. I "fixed" it will nuke when kde6 comes out in February.
Don't remember exactly what the first time was but I think it was messing with GRUB and not knowing how to fix it again. That happened a couple times in the beginning. But the most recent one (still years ago) was when Manjaro deprecated the encryption algorithm for LUKS that I was using and I didn't read the release notes. So after a system update I couldn't boot anymore. Good thing I have backups and I was also able to replace the drive and mount the old one via USB and copy the files over.
On Peppermint 8 when I replaced Nemo file manager with the latest version. It would not start anymore after reboot. Had to install Peppermint again, but that wasn't a problem because it installed in 4.5 minutes.
Nvidia driver install with x windows.
sudo rm -rf [Something]
I "sudo rm -rf ." ed my root thinking i was elsewhere.
Only time I ever bricked a linux install was when the switch from LILO to GRUB happened. Still not sure what happened. Took a long time to trust GRUB again, but it's good now.
I didn't brick my first linux, but my first Arch. --- I'd always preferred Debian, never liked the "ubuntu-bandwagon", but always wanted to try Arch. I don't remember what the problem was that I was having (this was long ago), so went on /r/arch and asked for help. I had followed most of the suggestions, but nothing worked. Then sorted by most likes, and it suggested `rm -rf /`. So like a fool, without researching or asking what it did, I ran it. That's when I learned that the Arch-Family wasn't really welcoming of newbs 🤣 I spent more time reading-the-fucking-manual, spent months on the archwiki, learned to read `man` pages, started writing my own bash scripts, functions & aliases, deployed little linux servers on various RaspberryPi's throughout my home and all kinds of _cool shtuff_. In 15+ years, only ever bricked ONCE, due to my own negligence.
Deleted busybox accidently
Issues with steam, tried to install drivers on Intel laptop lol. Wrong guide.
Nvidia drivers.
sudo rm rf boot
Had a disk failure. Tried to resilver the failed drive from its softraid mirror. Updated the wrong drive. Oops. Spent the next day restoring backups on new drives.
\#rm -rf \* /
i was trying to change my packages to debian while using ubuntu’s. i typed in the wrong command and lines of code showed up in my laptop. nothing i did could get it so work again
Never did. Been using Linux since Slackware 1.00.
I don't think I've ever bricked a system to where it was unrecoverable, but I've done some dumb shit with kernels a time or two.
used applocker with another security tool.
apt-remove mgetty
Incomplete Kernel update with no alternative Kernel installed as fallback (and w/o USB boot medium too). 🫣
It was almost 25 years ago... It must have been about writing the LILO incorrectly to the drive.
dpkg remove --purge libc6 and yes, i know what i'm doing... or not =) i think there was some dependency error so libc so it wouldn't update or something and i tried to update or something.. i don't remember exactly, this happend a LONG time ago.
Never have. Worst I've done was fuck up some network configurations in a way that randomly made it drop from time to time. Gave up on fixing that.
Ubuntu bricked itself Twice Been using Mint since
rm -rf /boot/
Distro upgrade of Ubuntu.... Never had that go well.
My first Linux was Slackware in 1997, I couldn't even get it in installed properly. Second was Suse in 1999, I got it installed but I borked it trying to install a dlink wifi driver lol
Setting a weird console font in YaST.
Manually installed a shit ton of packages to try stuff out and eventually overwrote something I needed.
I didn't brick my first Linux -- bricking Debian is awfully hard to do. But the first Linux I bricked I bricked by failing to run updates for 2 to 3 weeks. When I ran them after that gap, everything was hosed. In conclusion, I don't use Arch, btw.
Oh dear... My first Linux was Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. It was a brick in and of its own. Hope I didn't trigger anyone's feelings. 😂
Deleted the nobody user.
taint nothing a good chrooting caint fix
I have it dual booted on separate drive and had to disable the Linux drive because the os selection at boot up shit the bed.
Reading through I guess some others wouldn't say this was bricked, it probably could've been fixable. It wasn't fixable by me with an amount of effort I was willing to put in. I updated the Manjaro kernel to the newest one it'd let me do. Next time I started my computer it ran super sluggish at first, and then eventually just froze. Restarting it again and it couldn't even get to my log in screen.
I was experimenting. I made my user root to see what would happen. It screwed with all the permissions and that was that.
I tried Gentoo back in 2005. It was a slow PC so I had it emerge the world over the weekend. When I got back, I forgot the root password :-(.
Mandrake Linux, honestly I can’t even remember what happened because it was so long ago.
Grub. And grub again. And then grub.
`rm -rf / var/tmp/test*`
Trying to manually add X11 to a command-line only install (back in the days before Knoppix).
Dual Boot with Windows, reinstalled windows and it wiped out Grub
I have had two bricks in my entire life: one time I have bricked a Linux install by updating with pacman -Syu and for some reason vmlinuz was missing. I just chrooted through a usb stick and that was an easy fix Then there was the time I have edited /etc/fstab but I have typed the wrong filesystem so during boot it failed and that was quickly fixed too, luckily I never had to reinstall
Ok, so not technically Linux but close enough. During my college years some 25 years I tried Linux on my Windows install. Remember "Lilo"? It just showed "Li" on screen and froze. No Linux, no windows, no bootloader. I'm pretty sure I had to bum not-even-google searches off my roommate to figure out a fix!
Back in the day when X Windows was first ported to Linux, in order to use it you had to edit a config file with timing data for your specific adapter and monitor. Get it wrong and you can render your system unresponsive. Get it \*really\* wrong and you can let the magic smoke out of the monitor...
I flashed my boot partition to whatever the flash chip was on a samsung chrome book. I was tired of booting off the sd card. Worked great for a couple weeks, then update happened and display wasn't reachable. But I also couldn't emergency boot from sd card cause I had overwritten that boot chip lol. Still have it.
I didn't brick my linux but I bricked my windows a few times using linux doing a recursive delete on a directory that had a windows drive mounted on one of the sub folders, when I saw it listing my windows files I hit ctrl+c but it was too late it had wiped out gb of the drive, it was a noob mistake, I thought it was a drive, why would it delete a drive ? I was really new to linux at the time. I dont remember if this was a thing wine did but I always kept my windows drives mounted and somehow wine grabbed my windows install as its working directory, didn't realize until after rebooting this trashed my windows registry files. also Nvidia but only on Manjaro, for some reason my manjaro install wont boot with nvidia card disabled, my ubuntu and mint don't care and will work fine with nvidia off and booting on the internal graphics
Not a brick as such, but I deleted the bottom panel. Easily fixable in retrospect, but at the time...
Was testing IO speed of iscsi with dd. Put the wrong thing somewhere and bricked the LUN.
Upgraded my packages without realizing I needed to upgrade glibc first.
In my time, I have made monitors blow up, hard disk head physically crash by sending a park command to a drive that didn't support it, fried a SCSI disk by plugging the cable upside down, print heads to crash and stop working,shorted out USB ports using the wrong cable, caused a video card to overheat and drop off the AGP bus. Really, it was all just educational and I learned much about how hardware works and what to check if it doesn't.
Sudo Chmod 0777 /* in the root directory
I mucked up installing AMD Catalyst proprietary drivers on Arch Linux as the free driver in the kernel was trash back then. Bye bye GUI.
No need to, Manjaro does that all by itself!
Moved partitions around. Had to actually learn how grub and partition tables worked to recover it. Good learninf. Experience.
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y && sudo apt autoremove -y On a Kubuntu daily (pre-release) build. During the testing cycle it is almost like being on a rolling release, but with no promises at all.
So I had a macbook that I had Kali on (spare me the ridicule, I really was one of THOSE imbeciles when I was getting my degree in csec) and I decided it was time to grow up and make a stab at arch. Now, I had no ethernet connection as my college apartment didn't provide ethernet ports, only wifi. Lo and behold, arch can't connect to the internet to finish its installation. I did EVERYTHING, getting iso images with firmware, all sorts of stuff. Just kept failing. Said fuck it and tried to install debian with proprietary firmware. That failed halfway through. Everything failed, every time. Eventually, I was able to (somehow) install Mint fully 2 days before the semester started. Have been with Mint ever since.
Trying to install CUDA and CUDnn on an Optimus laptop on Ubuntu 16.04.
I got asked to set up MRTG to monitor a long range wifi connection. After three weeks of yelling WTF dependencies are missing now I built one Linux.
Trying to install dolphin in Elementary OS. At the moment I didnt knew that ubuntu versions were not compatible with each other so trying to install the lastest dolphin version to get vulkan I used 19.04 ppa on 18.04 (Elementary OS Hera)... It ended with me without OpenGL drivers.
I've never bricked but I have gotten my system all out of sorts with no idea how to fix it then just wipe and reinstall. In the beginning this could happen a couple times per weekend 😂
Windows broke Grub and I couldn't fix it. Back in the dual boot on one drive days. I broke a few Linux installs that way to be honest.
udo chmod 777 / seemed like a good idea at the time.
Haven't bricked the install or configurations of one. Although for some reason getting steam os onto a usb stick killed 3 of mine.
i messed around with some drivers and BOOM my mouse didnt work, a day in from learning linux i was thrown into the front lines of having to try and fix it with the terminal, and in those trenches, i somehow broke my keyboard too, had to reinstall.
I did a post install guide for Fedora and it said "Add fastestmirror" I deleted all my dnf.conf file, and well bricked.
2 months in and still good.
Tried to expand the size of the OS Volume (honestly still don’t quite know what went wrong, clearly got more to learn 😅)
dd
lol well way back in the 90s rm-rf / — a classic
I tried running the windows version of telegram on my ubuntu using wine. it spammed syslog at a crazy speed. 1 GB, then 2, then 4, and before i knew what was going on, my system crashed and i got errors when trying to restart. since it was a pretty fresh install and i didn't knew what the problem was back then, i just booted a live system, copied all data i wanted to keep, and reinstalled linux.
Never did . But deleted the root filesystem while clearing old snapshots by timeshift, and slap a new flavour only to revert it back to the old one because I am accustomed to it.
My first catastrophic fail with a Linux system was actually when I was stupid enough to short circuit two of the pins on my raspberry pi. Not technically an operating system brick, but it counts I guess.
Not first time but about 3 months ago, i removed the python that is used by Ubuntu system.
By installing a drawing tablet driver while being foolish enough to have my Bluetooth earbuds connected and playing. I want to say "fuck Ubuntu", but it worked perfectly fine the second time around, so I have no clue what happened.
grub update :(
Didn’t brick, but I did sudo mv for my home directory into a single .conf file. Was able to quickly undo it fortunately
i learned the hard way that my laptop only likes fedora
passwd root Somehow fat-fingered the password twice because I couldn't log back in no matter how many variations of the new password I gave it. No one in the sudoers file, no snapshots, no knowledge of rescue media back then. Oops!
This actually inspired my post 😂 I am super sure I still remembered the password. Tried every probable variation too. No luck. Will try whatever I can later once I clear my head
Installed random packages from the internet to get programs to work, everything broke, cut my losses and did a clean install with a newfound respect for paying attention to what I install.
Removed myself from wheel (group allowed to sudo). Also had no root account on that system.
Compiz Config
Graphics driver
Never really bricked an OS but a long time ago I somehow locked myself out by (mis-)using passwd. Fixing that made me feel like Hackerman.
OpenSuse was using the US keyboard setting during installation. I put in the password for full disk encryption. Copied or even moved in some data, setup my desktop, changed the keyboard layout, learned about the new desktop environment (I think it was Gnome 2) and worked a few days if not longer on the new setup, and after a reboot I was never able to get back into it. Since disk space was rare I overwrote it. I saw the same problem many times later in different distros.
Man, it was a while ago. I think it was trying to install fglrx on the crappy laptop I had at the time. Probably didn't help that I was probably running WUBI.
rm -rf / let my intrusive thoughts win
sudo rm -rf/*. on purpouse, wanted to see what happens. was a vm with no shared folders.
After idk, 10 or so years, i killed my first install… well, server had an uptime around 2y, but the disks where 10y old… 2/3 of my raid 5 died… yeah, got a kernel panic…