|::| Saturday, August 31, 2002
- |::| 2:10:20 PM
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In five words or less: "We don't realize we're lost."
(...as well evidenced by the progression, above, from grim to positivistic. Wake up and sniff the koolaid: Can't you smell the bitter almonds?)
- |::| More Heresy 11:39:59 AM
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I've spent the last week-plus dealing with a melted ext3fs partition on my primary (Linux) box. "But I thought Linux was supposed to be so much more stable! I thought Linux was supposed to be better!"
For the record, for whatever difference it makes: I chose Linux for my future, not because it's better or easier or "just works." For the record, for me, Linux has very seldom "just worked." It took several tries to get a workable install on my first system (a 600MHz K6); I never got a working system to install on the 800MHz Duron I replaced it with; and it took a solid week and a half with I don't know how many install attempts to get a working install on the HP Pavilion I've been using as my primary workstation. And I reboot one morning and find that, not only is the partition table wildly inaccurate (to say the least), but that none of the conventionally recommended remedies can touch the problem. (One even made it drastically worse.)
But apparently this and related problems (partition meltdowns and filesystem collapses on extx filesystems) are common enough to make it profitable for a company to promote a line of commercial, Windows-based products to address them. I'm using one of them now, and have been for the past week or so, trying to salvage some of the data from the portion of the disk I can't read in Linux.
Windows isn't entirely blameless, of course. My WinME installation on that system (which has been used for perhaps five or six hours a month over the last four months) has deteriorated rapidly in stability; I suppose it's possible (though I've yet to hear anybody say anything specific) that it could have caused the partition problem. Though one of the few files I've managed to recover so far (the error log for X11) seems to indicate that the partition was corrupted before I shut down Linux....
So what will I do? I need to develop Linux skills, so I'll be reinstalling Linux -- but this time, with a substantial Fat32 partition that will serve as a disaster-recovery zone. No WinME this time, since I've gone ahead and hooked up a K, V & M (real, not switched) to my Picturebook. I'm back on PMMail, off Evolution, which galls, since PMMail's support for just about everything is so backward and the product so shamefully orphaned in its own home.
All I'm waiting for now is for myself to get tired of trying to grab data from that poor, trashed drive....
