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.
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
As GNU/Linux user, I don't like this meme too. I've seen this so many times that it's not funny anymore. And if it was, it should be posted to c/linuxmemes, not here.
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 *.dlWhich 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.
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."
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...
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".
If you're running Linux with the French language add-on installed, you can delete it:
rm -fr /
