Sometimes I get flummoxed, flustered and make a big mistake, like the time I deleted the Admin identity on my Win2K system and totally hosed Windows. That wasn’t what I was trying to do, I just got mixed up and clicked in the wrong place… or…. something. Heck, I don’t even know how I did it but I salvaged what I could and reinstalled Windows.

Elapsed time: About three days.

I’ve a history of making my computing experience far more interesting than it really needed to be. When I switched to Linux (Debian Etch, thank you very much) I wasn’t entirely able to change my ways. Soon after I became a full time Linux user my main computer went stone dead. Because the light wouldn’t even come on I decided it must be the power supply so I took off the cover (something I’d never done before I started tinkering with Linux), removed the power supply and took to a small shop about 20 miles from here. He checked it, said it was bad and sold me a good used one for $10. I put the used one into the computer, put the cover back on and fired it up. Everything was back to normal.

Elapsed time: Less than one day.

ISO files, from which one can burn Linux CDs are usually around 700 MB in size and I never noticed how full my 20 GB hard drive was getting until I got an error message while I was downloading yet another ISO file. I just thought maybe there was some problem with the download server and it was late so I decided I’d try again the next day and, thinking nothing at all of it, I shut down my computer, as I do every night. The next morning my computer wouldn’t boot up and one of the error messages said something about there being no room on my hard drive. I thought about it for a few minutes, grabbed a Linux live CD from my collection (I’ve forgotten which distro it was but any of several would have worked fine), plugged it into the CD drive (which I opened with a bent paper clip), turned on the computer, let the live CD boot up, opened a file manager, located the trash folder on the main hard drive and deleted it’s contents which freed up close to 2 GB of disk space. I then exited the live CD and rebooted my computer. Everything was back to normal.

Elapsed time: Less than an hour.

As an experiment, I tried installing Nimblex to a 2 GB thumb drive but it didn’t work; my computer wasn’t able to boot from the thumb drive and I was unable to simply reformat the thumb drive and return it to it’s normal duty (moving data from one non-networked computer to another). I hated having destroyed a perfectly good thumb drive so I kept going back to it every couple of days trying to figure out how to restore/repair it. I did manage to get the 900 MB swap partition reformatted as fat32 but I couldn’t do anything with the remaining 1.1 GB ext3 partition. It had three folders in it, labeled “boot”, “lost+found” and “nimblex” and I figured if I could delete them, even if I couldn’t figure out how to delete the partition, I could reformat it, thus making it usable but every attempt to delete any of these folders got me an “access denied” error message. When I plugged the thumb drive into my computer, two Konqueror windows popped up; sde1 and sde2 with the latter (sde2) being the one that’s hosed. I closed the sde1 window and, in the sde2 window, clicked on “Tools” , “Open terminal”. When the terminal window opened I typed “su”, typed in my root password and typed cfdisk. When cfdisk opened I could see the two partitions. I deleted them both, hit the “write” function and that left me 20 GB of free space….. wait, that wasn’t right….. ARGH! cfdisk wasn’t in sde, it was in hda, my main hard drive…

Yes gentle readers, in my typical bull-in-the-china-shop fashion, I deleted the partitions in my main hard drive. At that point it was running but on the reboot I was going to be in serious trouble so, as quickly as possible, I plugged in my external hard drive and made backup copies of my address book and all my personal files. With no functioning swap partition my computer started slowing down and finally froze up entirely but not before I’d backed up all the files I’d need to recover from the crash. With everything frozen, having no alternative, I held down the power button for a few seconds until it shut off and, as expected, when I turned it back on it wasn’t able to boot up. After some thought, I decided to try reversing the damage before reinstalling the OS.

I booted into a live CD, opened a root terminal, opened cfdisk and recreated my partitions based on my “best guesses” as to their size and configuration and tried once again to boot up. It worked! My computer booted up just fine but the video resolution came up at 640 X 480 and it seemed sluggish, as though it had no swap partition. I opened gparted and sure enough it found an unmounted parition on my hard drive. I right clicked on it, selected “Mount as Linux Swap” and my display instantly became more stable albeit at the wrong resolution. I wasn’t sure what to do next but felt it wouldn’t hurt to reboot. Yes, I know, that’s the hallmark of a long-time Windows user, “when in doubt, reboot” but it worked. I rebooted the computer and everything was back to normal.

Elapsed time: Less than two hours.

I’m not saying my Debian Etch system is bullet-proof or overlooking the likelyhood that I’ll eventually manage to hose it up beyond redemption but, put yourself in my place. My most serious, user induced, Windows crash put me out of commission for three days, I lost some data, and I had to reinstall Windows. My Debian Etch system has survived not one but three serious crashes (two of which were user induced), I’ve lost no data and in the worst case was out of service for less than 24 hours. Add to this the fact that I’ve had no trouble with viruses or malware since switching to Linux and it’s not hard to see why I’ve become a Linux believer. Do the math.