Yes this is a sorry tale of what not to do when you have a spare couple of hours. I have been intending to do a fresh install of my OS when I had the time but have been holding off as I did not want to disrupt the PC at present as it is aiding me with my job search (as mentioned in a previous post).
So I was sat here this afternoon with an unexpected couple of hours free, so I decided now would be a good time to do a little bit of prep work ready for my fresh OS install and actually install it ready for when I was ready to move over completely, a good idea I hear you say, but unfortunately things are not what they seem. My chosen Distro is SolydXK EE it is a derivative of Debian Testing and in my case I run the SolydX version with the XFCE desktop. So with an ISO burned to USB stick I rebooted the PC and booted from the USB. I had already checked gparted to ensure that I had the right disk (I have three hard disks installed, one for backup (on sdc) one has my current install of SolydX (on sdb) on it and the other hard disk (sda) I was intending to wipe the installed distro (just one I had been playing with) and was to become my new SolydX install. I won't bore you with the details but I was struggling to get the correct combination of partitions to be listed on the final stage of partitioning the drive (I was simply keeping the 3 partitions (home, root and swap) and just reformatting them but every time I got to the last screen, a partition from sdb (where my old install of SolydX is) was listed saying it was going to reformat it. So I kept going back in to the partitioning until I believed I had what I wanted. Imagine my horror when on the next screen I see "Formatting sdb2" (the root partition) to late. In the time it took me to stop it, only a couple of seconds, the damage was done. I rebooted the PC and when I tried to boot my old install I was taken to the rescue grub.
Now faced with the prospect of shall I try and get the old install to work or do a fresh install, I opted for the later. This is where thing take a happier turn, having checked, checked and checked again before I continued with the partition section this time I was able to install the fresh install and then copy my home partition (which was still intact) and take a couple of files from the backup and I am all up and running. Yes I still have all those little items to configure which normally take an age but the basic are there and working.
The importance of a backup should never be underestimated, I don't normally backup the root partition just a couple of odd files (like fstab) and my entire home partition. Fortunately for me my old home partition was still intact so I have been able to simply pull everything of that partition. Yes I could of rebuilt the fstab and I would probably have forgotten some of the syntax and taken a couple of hours to get it right, but in this instance I had an old one in backup which I could work from so I had my NAS and Backup drive were available in minutes rather than hours.
The point of all this is two fold, when playing with your hard disk partitions make sure that you have a backup, then when making changes to the drive structures even if it is not the drive your OS is installed on, check the changes you are about to make, then check them again and finally so that you can shout to yourself I have chosen the correct bl**dy partitions check again because as I found out, it only takes two seconds for the damage to be done.
Have a nice evening all regards Tim H -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday, 2018-09-04 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk / CHECK IF YOU'RE REPLYING Reporting bugs well: http://goo.gl/4Xue / TO THE LIST OR THE AUTHOR
