I caused a similar problem trying to replace the Windows 98 boot screen with a picture of a Borg cube. But it made for a fun afternoon of frantic troubleshooting!

My mom tought me how to 'manage' my own floppy disk...

Too bad I mixed up A and C while formatting... back then, nobody knew how to install an OS; machine was declared 'bricked' and when on the attick... it was 6 years before another PC entered our household...

I used to go through all the folders on my magazine cover CDs looking for interesting stuff - mostly game assets in formats I knew how to play with outside the game, like MOD files, sound files, images, but I found a file of emails to/from one of the contributors one time. (Sorry to that person for reading their private email! I was a very bored 15y/o and it was buried treasure to me.)

Also I loved to load executable files into a hex editor and look for readable symbols among the stuff that was beyond my understanding.

There was a bug in my hex viewer, though, where you could scroll off the end of the file and it would hexdump the next block on disk or memory locations beyond the loaded file instead. So I got very confused/paranoid viewing what I thought was the file from one game and seeing messages from another game or some of my own personal information.

Nah, the directories are off the root in \ALIASES and \UTIL along side the actual game and demo content (e.g. "\SAMDEMO", "\LVL10", etc.)

Did some poking around and found a reference to my copy being "REBEL ASSAULT 1.2". I'll have to note that someplace.