[plug] A story

[William Kenworthy]

On Monday the 20th Dec @ ~430pm I had one of the seemingly random, but
occasional interactions that occur when running openoffice and vmware at
the same time when the machine is heavily loaded: a total hard lockup.
After a mirror image to Brads recovery techniques and missing 30GB of
system and data I have now done a complete gentoo reinstall, reloaded my
14G plus of data and am now trying to remember which of the many
hundreds of applications available that I need to reinstall. 

I had a workable system the next day but to get back to where I was with
a 18 month old system will take awhile ...

I am very UN-impressed with ext3, having had continual problems with
corruptions and minor data loss (laptops do lose power, and when running
bleeding edge do lockup occasionally) but this allowed me to go back to
reiserfs where at least I have always been able to recover the data with
minimal effort, and where problems were much more rare on a laptop
(personnel experience - I have now used both systems on a laptop -
reiserfs for ~2 yrs and ext3 for ~18 mths - reiserfs wins hands down!).

I am also setting up a spare 60G partition for a full backup regime
instead of just data - I deleted my old copy some time back when I ran
low on disk space.  Somehow I am missing my configuration (/etc) backups
which is a real pain.

BillK


On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 20:31 +0400, Brad Campbell wrote:
> Are you sitting comfortably?
> Right then, let's begin shall we?