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Alternate Title – Why Castlevania and Fdisk Don’t Mix

Some of you may have noticed that I have not been on AIM for several days, which is unlike me. The reason for this is that a little while ago my filesystem got corrupted by either Windows Update or defrag or something and I had to reinstall Windows, but that didn’t fix my problem so I had to reformat and start clean. The nice thing about having a Windows drive and a Linux drive is that when one fucks up on me, I can back everything up to the other one, so I never lose anything important. So I copied all my important data to my Linux drive and carried on.

I struggled with DOS fdisk for a while to get it to do what I wanted, because some versions of fdisk (notably the one that came with my rescue cd) only support partitions of up to 2 gigs. Ugh. Eventually I got it to work or so I thought, and I started formatting my hard drive. I was very eager to just have the damn thing start formatting so I could get back to my game of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow so I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on. About 40 minutes later it tells me drive C is formatted. That’s a lot of formatting, but whatever. Yay! I installed Win98 and booted up.

I go to check out my partitions and notice that I have three, which is weird because I only wanted two. Windows tells me I have about 240 gigs of free space among all of the partitions, yet my windows drive is only 120 gigs. Wow! Two hard drives’ worth of free space on one hard drive somehow, isn’t that great? Then it slowly dawned on me what had happened. Fuck. I must have accidentally just reformatted my Linux drive. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck! You know what sucks? Losing about 6 years of stuff I’ve been working on. This feeling of impending doom slowly sank into me.

On a longshot I decided to boot up an Ubuntu cd and see if I could salvage anything from my now-empty Linux drive. By some miracle I was able to mount the partitions that used to be there, and recover all my stuff. Well, some of it. One of the partitions got pretty messed up, but luckily it was the partition where I keep my system files and not my personal data files. So I installed Ubuntu and now Linux is good to go again. Holy crap was I relieved.

Now things are pretty much back to normal. As it turns out, I spent the next 3 days struggling to install Windows 98 correctly only to remember that it can’t handle more than 512 megs of RAM by default (which I have).

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2006 at 11:28 am and is filed under Random Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.