Prokoba's Blog

All programmers are optimists
– Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Fedora 8: Werewolf is officially out. Not big news for me since I’ve been running the Werewolf final bits as soon as they were made available (since last Sunday)

Anyways it’s fun to know that there were 8 updated packages in my installation 9 minutes after the official release

Congratulations everyone for the wonderful release (finally no tearing during movie playback under compiz!)

I am a dumb bot!

I managed to wipe out my entire home partition! It’s not easy to do a mkfs.reiserfs on the wrong partition but I did just that. And the fact that I did it through Fedora 8: Werewolf’s install program is even more illuminating if you still doubt my endless stup^Wwisdom

Six years of various project development, backups, IM  history, thesis writing, my personal financial data, a few gigabytes of pictures (including Dida’s gallery), this very blog – all gone. And of course – no backups. How can I backup 250 GiG of data without paying for a tape device or a second hard disk? Actually the second hard drive is an excellent idea but I’m sure if I get one I’ll just fill it with even more valuable information instead of useless data duplication like backups… I never imagined I could feel such excruciating pain over a few billion ones and zeroes…
It was so close to being complete. Hell, it was complete, it was perfect… and “shit! now it’s all gone”

But did I say “stop being perfect”? “never be complete”? “let’s evolve”? (”fuck Martha Stewart!”?)

No! I spent four days and four nights backing up, analyzing and recovering my damaged home partition. ReiserFS. I’ll spare you the details of trying to backup 240 GiGs via an USB drive connected to the USB 1.0 hub of my LCD monitor. Neither you need to know about the expensive proprietary tool which recovered about a gigabyte of the 240 GiG partition. Most of it was unusable junk.

When everything else failed reiserfsck –rebuild-tree –scan-whole-partition performed miracles. Virtually everything seems to have come back from the bit bucket – including my AES encrypted  super-secret partition DD

I’m a lucky bastard

I can never describe how I feel right now. I almost died after reiserfsck finished and I typed the command for mounting the recovered filesystem.  Reiserfsck really was my last chance. My finger was shaking over the Enter key. My heart was beating like a drum. I was sweating like my life depended on the outcome of that command. In a sense it did!!!

Anyway, it’ll take a while before I verify that everything is in place but everything I’ve checked so far seems ok. Including this blog

I’ll be busy restoring the various other Zmei services (ftp, web, gallery,  etc) over the following days. I’m happy

Long live the Zmei !!!