Early 2002. I read about Linux somewhere, and I was trying a Mandrake install. I also read about control+alt+Backpage, which eagerly proceed to try.
Now I'm on tty, cursor blinking, thinking: I broke Linux.
Scared, I cleverly undid that mistake by simply... reinstalling the distro. Ignorance is NOT bliss.
Not OP, but here's how. You live-distro yourself to a running command prompt. You then connect to the internet, mount the partitions, finally chrooting to your computer's storage install. Once there, you clear pacman's lock from var and run a full update:
pacman -Syyu
. Wait until it finishes, exit chroot, reboot. 9 out 10 times works as expected.