In order to see approximate speeds for tarballing an entire system, and then restoring that system when if it was foobar'd, I partially cloned one of our primary systems onto a workstation that, while not integral to our company systems, would be nice to have functioning. I timed creating the tarball of the whole system, and inspected it to make sure it looked good.
I then ran rm -rf / --no-preserve-root. I've never had the opportunity to do that before, so it was a lot of fun. At first.
When I rebooted the box, nothing showed up. Not a "Dell" logo, not options for the BIOS, nothing.
I hooked up the drive to a different box, and found to my chagrin that it had a UEFI partition. I assume that my Command of Death effectively hosed that partition.
I hooked up a different, functioning drive to the now defunct workstation, but the workstation still does nothing.
Has anyone seen anything like this, or have suggestions as to what to look for? How did running that rm command manage to so royally mess up the entire box?
UPDATE: We returned the box to Dell. We weren't able to precisely diagnose if it was a coincidence or the situation as described by dronus. However, I will accept dronus' answer as it describes a possible reason why this would happen. Further, it will caution others against doing the same thing in the future. If anyone finds some record of Dell using buggy UEFI, that would be helpful.
