•  azimir   ( @azimir@lemmy.ml ) 
    28•11 months ago

    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.

  •  June   ( @June@lemm.ee ) 
    27•10 months ago

    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

  •  Hot Saucerman   ( @dingus@lemmy.ml ) English
    16•11 months ago

    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 *.dl

    Which 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.

    •  argv_minus_one   ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) English
      22•11 months ago

      I just tried this in an MS-DOS + Windows 3.1 virtual machine that I have, and no, that doesn’t happen. del *.dl does exactly what you’d expect.

      • del *.dl does not delete DLL files. Your friend probably accidentally pressed the L key twice.
      • del *.dl does not delete anything in any folder other than the current one. Your friend probably stored his porn in the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder or something.
      • I don’t think there even is a built-in way in MS-DOS to delete files matching a pattern across multiple folders. You can delete files in a single folder matching a pattern (del), or you can delete a folder and all of its contents (deltree), but neither of those does what you’re talking about.
      • Deleting DLLs stops Windows from starting, but doesn’t stop MS-DOS from booting. MS-DOS doesn’t have any DLLs to delete.
      • MS-DOS isn’t even capable of loading DLLs at all. If you were writing an MS-DOS program and you wanted to link code dynamically, you had to bring your own dynamic linker to do it with. Fun times.

      You’re right that it doesn’t stop you from deleting system files, though, which is kind of odd as MS-DOS does have a mechanism for stopping you from doing that: the “system” attribute. This is used to protect the MS-DOS kernel files, IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS. For whatever reason, though, the Windows installer doesn’t give the Windows system files this attribute, so you can still see them and delete them at will.

      •  Hot Saucerman   ( @dingus@lemmy.ml ) English
        5•11 months ago

        Your friend probably accidentally pressed the L key twice

        That’s probably what he did and I don’t know why he would store his porn in the system folder, but it did genuinely bork the computer and his dad was pretty pissed, because his dad was a banker and all his work was on it.

        I never tested it myself partially because I didn’t want to kill my system and well, my parents had a Mac.

  •  azimir   ( @azimir@lemmy.ml ) 
    16•11 months ago

    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.”

  •  AnonTwo   ( @AnonTwo@kbin.social ) 
    15•11 months ago

    I mean, there’s a reason they don’t let you delete system32 anymore

    It’s like one of the earliest troubleshooting joke memes. It just so happens people actually did that, and not because they wanted to do that.

    But like on earlier versions of Windows you could absolutely delete any folder on the drive. I think there’s even a story about an uninstaller that accidentally deleted the entire root of the drive because it wasn’t written correctly.

  •  corporateHippie   ( @corporateHippie@lemmy.ml ) 
    13•10 months ago

    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…

    •  Octopus   ( @Octopus1348@thelemmy.club ) 
      4•10 months ago

      Yes. Also happened to me. Linux distros also do this (if you didn’t specify a separate boot partition), so next time you need to erase an OS, go into that partition, and remove the folder corresponding to the OS like “Windows” or “Ubuntu”.

    •  AnonTwo   ( @AnonTwo@kbin.social ) 
      3•11 months ago

      Just wondering, but is there anything regarding packages or flatpaks (and variants of them) that would make immutable systems a requirement in order to use your applications, or would it still be possible to use a regular distro?

      I’m sure there wouldn’t really be any complaints regarding 90% of linux users using immutable systems, as long as applications weren’t “locked in” to using those exclusively.