[PLUG] Gremlins in the Machine

As a promise to a co-worker, and because I needed some stuff off of the machine, I decided to fix my Linux desktop which hadn't been booted since the summer of 2010. A kernel and/or grub update that summer mis-identified the boot drive so grub kept failing. I could't get to the raw files with a boot CD because I had put "/" on an LV and wasn't familiar enough with LVM to manually mount the LV volume. I had a Mac Mini which I was using for the sole purpose of managing an iPod, and got lazy and just started using that. I tried a few dozen times to fix the boot problem before giving up, googled LVM and found stuff I never bothered trying. The abandoned computer was another example of the dentist who's kids have rotten teeth, the lawyer without a will and the cobbler with barefoot kids.

So today, I boot with knoppix and check out the menu.lst file and backup. I ran a diff and the main file and backup were the same. So I tried to boot the HD again just to refresh my memory on the error. It just booted fine. Just fine. Not only that, but the disk activity light — which never worked — now works. Maybe this thing just wasn't dusty enough. Maybe it had been too pampered and now just craved attention.

Thanks for indulging my rant.

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