Can texconfig wipeout a harddisk?

[Ryan Scott <scott@leorg.ucdavis.edu>]

Hi,

I am not sure who this should be going to, but I thought I would start
with
this list. If you know who the appropriate person to forward this to
is, please do so with me as a cc:.

I am trying to find out if it is possible for the texconfig program
within
teTeX 1.0.6 to wipe out a hard disk.  Right now it is my leading
suspect for
a system wipe I am recovering from.  Here are the details:

System: NeXTstep 3.3 running on a NeXTstation (moto 68040 processor)
        (Basically, BSD 4.3 unix with DPS based GUI)

Using precompiled binaries from NeXT archive (www.peak.org/next/).

Initial installation was successful and ran well for over a week. 

I decided to enable $TEXMFVAR and $HOMEMF variables in texmf.cnf.
After saving texmf.cnf, I ran texconfig, as root, from the command
line. It
began to start up (gave a couple of messages which I don't remember,
not warnings). During this period, there was alot of disk activity
which I took
to be a rebuilding of the ls-R database. Since this can take some
time on the older NeXTstations, I went to run some errands for 30
mins.
When I returned, the machine had frozen. It turns out that the root
disk
and all mounted disks had been wiped. It was as if a rm -r * had been
run.

Needless to say, I would like to track down what the possible causes
could be. Is there some way I could have messed up the texmf.cnf file
so that texconfig would run amuck?

Please reply as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Ryan Scott