[PLUG] HD hosed by stupidity and xcdroast

["Michael Leone" <turgon@mike-leone.com>]

I *knew* there was a reason I disliked that damn program.

I set it up tonight; told it to use /tmp as image storage. Apparently, I
misunderstood what it wanted, since the thing wanted a *partition* that it
could mount, to use as storage for the CD images. Not a directory, or a
mount point - it wanted it's own dedicated, actual, unmounted partition,
like /dev/hdb2. I thought that's what it wanted, and then said "Nahh ... it
must mean a directory to use, not a whole unmounted partition. Lemme tell it
to use /tmp".

Ya know, after all these years, you'd think I'd know better than to listen
to me.

 And - of course - I hadn't had a chance to make /tmp it's own separate
partition, the way I had it set up at one point, since I wanted to make it a
ReiserFS partition. So /tmp was part of the main / partition.

And when xcdroast went to mount the partition, and asked me if it should
mount the image mount point (i.e., should it mount the /dev/hdb2 partition -
since it couldn't figure out that /tmp was just a directory on an already
mounted partition), what did fumble fingers me do?

Yep; answered "yep". Fingers moving before brain. And xcdroast wiped the
whole /dev/hdb2 partition. Including /, /usr, etc.

<SIGH>

And so now I have an blank Linux partition. All gone .. poof. I boot into my
Win2K partition (thankfully, on another drive), and examine the disk, using
Partition Magic. Shows as "Unallocated" space, within an extended partition.
Bye bye Linux installation.

Who wants to guess whether or not I had current backups? :-(

Ah, well. The loss of email is the biggest loss; everything else can be
re-downloaded and re-installed. I've lost a number of months of email. I'll
survive, but I'll be pissed.

Live, learn and suffer, I always say.

>From now on ... I use gcombust to burn CDs on Linux. :-)

I suppose I could look at it as an oppurtunity to change distributions. I
was running RH 6.2; maybe I'll try RH7. I'm more comfortable with RH than
anything else Or maybe Debian, altho my web/ftp server is already running
Debian.

Kinda like a comedy of errors, isn't it?






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