From a Slashdot article I got directed to this page: Admin Horror Stories.
Absolutly good for a laugh :)

One of my favourites is:

Years ago when I was working in the Graphics Workshop at Edinburgh
University, we used to have a small UNIX machine for testing. The
machine wasn't used too much, so nobody bothered to set up user
accounts, and so everybody was running as root all the time. Now one of
the chaps who used to come in was fond of reading fortunes
(/usr/games/fortune having been removed from the University's real
machines along with all the other games). Guess what happened when the
machine said

# fortune

fortune: write error on /dev/null --- please empty the bit bucket

Quite a lot of stuff wouldn't work after the chap was done with the
machine for the day. You bet we put up proper accounts after that!

As it happens I did something silly once, back in the period I was
helping Chris with some computer service stuff. We where just looking
install some new software on a guys Windows machine (in a business). He
had partitions all over the place but was only using one of them. So we
decided to consolidate the unused partitions to make space.

Fired up fdisk to delete the extra partitions. We carefully wrote down
all the sizes and stuff and proceeded to delete them. If you've used
DOS FDISK you'll know it's a pain in the butt. Can't remember exactly
how but we ended up deleting the wrong partition. Oops!

Fortunatly we had the details so we added it back exactly the same
size. You'd think this would be fine. However, one detail about dos fdisk
is that it wipes the first sector of a partition, otherwise dos gets
confused about the size. Without this sector dos assumes the filesystem
is empty.

At this point we were beginning to sweat. We had a Linuxcare bootable
cd which we had used to view the system in various way (sector counts
and stuff) but nothing that just fixes the filesystem header but leaves
the FAT tables and root partition alone. In the end we formatted
another partition and used dd to copy the first sector over. At this
point we could access the data and make a backup. We'd been this
close to losing all the guys data.

Sure learn't a lesson from that one...
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