Early Christmas

Early Christmas

[Richard B. Johnson]

     Let me get this out before Christmas (with apologies
     for being off-topic)

     T`Was the night before payday and all through the house,
         Not a computer was working as I clicked the mouse;
     The screen turned blue and out slewed some text,
         Showing register dumps and addresses in hex;
     The disk-light was glowing and loud were the sounds,
         Of whip-lashing disk-seeks way out-of-bounds;
     Then quick as a wink the screen started to flash,
         Upon each new re-boot the system would crash;
     I reached for the Windows CD/ROM to install,
         The system again, from scratch all, and all;
     I worked several hours trying to make,
         The new Windows Operating System to take;
     It would never complete the booting sequence,
         Nothing I did, made any sense;
     Then what to my wondering eyes should appear,
         But a Linux machine to which I'd grown dear;
     I connected the disk from the Windows box broken,
         Into the Linux machine as a token;
     And deleted that corrupt Windows partition,
         So another install would allow recognition;
     Then back to the Windows machine I did all,
        The Windows partition completed install;
     And recover all data, programs, and curia,
         From my quietly running Linux server.
     -- Richard B. Johnson --
 

Cheers,
Dick Johnson
Penguin : Linux version 2.4.18 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).
   Bush : The Fourth Reich of America

Re: Early Christmas

[Disconnect]

On Fri, 2002-11-01 at 16:21, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> 
>      Let me get this out before Christmas (with apologies
>      for being off-topic)


Thats cute.. unfortunately, that's what just happened to my linux
server.  (It went sky high, 400-odd entries in /lost+found after a
corrupted ext3 superblock.  Oh, and most of /etc (at least) was
corrupted with binary garbage.  Linux tends to get annoyed when
/etc/group is nothing but 8bit noise...)

If I can reproduce it on something slightly less 'weird' (read: heavily
patched and completely untested) than the Gentoo kernels I'll post bug
reports.  But in the meantime, recovery continues ... :(