A couple of weeks ago we talked about technology that was innately disappointing, but what's even worse is when a perfectly good piece of tech is fried, dropped, spilled on, stepped on, or otherwise ruined by acts of man and nature. You know the drill: first an accident happens, then your heart jumps into your throat and the expletives start flying as you verify that you have indeed just destroyed a $2,000 piece of equipment or lost every pixel of your irreplaceable family photos.

Instead of watching scary movies this Friday the 13th, why not relive the stuff that frightened us in real life? What follows is a compendium of unfortunate tech disasters gathered from the Ars staff, laid out in all of their grisly glory (including three from Sean Gallagher, who was cursed by a witch specializing in IT mayhem). Chances are you'll find a disaster that you yourself have lived through—try to sympathize rather than laughing. Some of these wounds are still fresh.

Single backup of 3 years of digital photography—tossed out a third-story window

Does your backup strategy account for all failure scenarios? In 2005, mine didn't. I kept all my digital photography on my 12" PowerBook G4's hard drive, which was periodically backed up to an external FireWire hard drive. That seemed safe enough, until some unruly children tossed the external drive out of a third story window onto the asphalt below.

That might have been totally fine, since I could just buy a new hard drive and start new backups of the 12" PBG4. However, the hard drive in my machine had failed after a couple years of heavy use and was in the process of being replaced; that external drive was the only backup I had.

At the time, I was attending Purdue University and going back and forth between campus, my apartment, and my then-girlfriend's apartment. On the night in question, my external backup drive was among some textbooks and other things I had over at her place; I was in the middle of various homework and other projects and could pull files from the backup drive as needed.

The rest of the scenario seemed innocuous enough at the time. My girlfriend had agreed to watch her brother's three young children (ages 2-6) on the night of his anniversary. One of the windows in the living room was open slightly for ventilation because the old historic building had no air conditioning. She was making dinner in the kitchen, her nine-year-old daughter was playing with the kids, and I had to run over to my apartment briefly to grab something school-related to finish up my work. What could go wrong?

While I was gone—approximately 15-20 minutes—my girlfriend's nephews had apparently opened up the window enough to begin tossing everything that wasn't bolted down onto the sidewalk and street three stories below. That included the cushions and pillows from furniture, freshly folded laundry waiting to be put away, a stack of unopened birthday presents for my girlfriend's daughter (to be opened the next day), and three years of photography contained on my backup hard drive. I found it spread out in a vast array of plastic and metal shards in the middle of Main Street in downtown Lafayette, Indiana. A year or two later I ended up finding some of the pictures on DVDs I had used to make slideshows, but otherwise lost more than 99 percent of my photos.

Since then, I've taken to making 2 DVD-R backups of every digital photo (stored in separate locations) in addition to storing at least one backup on HDD, separate from my regular boot drive backups. Because frankly, you just never know when someone will chuck three years of work out a window.

—Chris Foresman

The notoriously buggy state of open source software, and my brave attempts to fix a devastating Linux bug

You know how it is. You install Windows 2000 shortly after its release, get it all set up, have everything running perfectly, but there's one thing that's bugging you. The Windows directory, specifically its name. "WINDOWS." In all caps. Shouting at you. What operating system do you use? WINDOWS! It's just so... uncouth.

Unfortunately, Windows 2000 won't let you rename the Windows directory to a far more respectable "Windows." When you're in Windows, there are all manner of open files in the WINDOWS directory, and Windows won't let you rename a folder in that situation.

So you do what any normal person does. You boot into your Linux virtual machine, running a cutting-edge 2.4.0-test1 kernel. That kernel has an NTFS driver, albeit one marked EXPERIMENTAL (again with the all caps. Why's everybody gotta shout so much?), so it should be a simple matter to rename the offending directory.

Except unfortunately it isn't. Windows 2000 had a new version of NTFS, known often as version 5 (because Windows 2000 is "Windows NT 5"), but more accurately as version 3.0 (because that's what the internal version stamp actually says), and the Linux developers hadn't yet gotten around to adding support for that version. Their driver can read data well enough, but all write operations are blocked.

But Linux is open source, and as we all know, whenever an open source project doesn't do what you want, you use the power of the source code to bend it to your will. Crack open the tarball and get to work writing some code to fix it!

In this case, fixing it meant opening up fs/ntfs/super.c and finding the following comment: "Check for NTFS version and if Win2k version (ie. 3.0+) do not allow write access since the driver write support is broken, especially for Win2k." The next few lines are simple; they look at the version stamp of the file system, and if it's 0x0300 or higher, they add a flag to the volume's mount options and force it to be read-only.

Even for an amateur programmer, the fix here is trivial. Leverage one of the most powerful debugging techniques known to man, and comment out the offending lines.

With the code fixed and the bug vanquished, one simply has to rebuild the kernel and load the new and improved NTFS driver. Needless to say, it compiles without a hitch and runs beautifully.

Now to fix that ugly directory name. Mount the disk—with writes enabled, thank-you-very-much—and simply mv WINDOWS Windows . No errors or warnings or other indications that anything untoward has happened, so it's time to reboot into a cleaner, calmer, altogether less shouty Windows 2000.

To this day I don't really know how it happened, because the plan seemed pretty bulletproof, but rebooting into Windows didn't quite work. Somewhere along the line—it's not clear to me where—the entire partition got hideously corrupted, destroying Windows, all the applications I had installed, and every shred of data. There was to be no recovery; I had to wipe the disk and reinstall everything from scratch.

Nowadays, Windows installs itself to a directory sensibly named "Windows." Much better.

—Peter Bright