Sometimes Linux is just amazing!

[Phaete]

Who woulda thunk you could create a whole file structure on a partition (hdd1), then completely delete the partitions (hdd1 = 6.3GB primary ext2 and hdd5 = 3.7GB logical extended ext2) and recreate one new 10GB primary partition (hdd1) without hosing any of the files on the partition!?

Let's see Windows do THAT!!

summary steps:

fdisk'ed hdd1=6.3GB hdd5=3.7GB
dd'ed /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hdd1 (root mounted here)
changed lilo.conf and fstab to root=hdd1
reboot with root=hdd1
available disk space didn't reflect 6.3GB (rather hdb1's 1.7GB) ~ tried fixing with couple utilities posted here ~ no go
changed lilo/fstab back to root-hdb1
flashed BIOS (fdisk reported cyl/head/sec problem)
cfdisk'ed /dev/hdd to delete part's, recreate 10GB hdd1
df'ed and noticed 1.7GB of 10GB allocated
mounted /dev/hdd1 /data ~ saw intact files
changed lilo.conf and fstab to root=hdd1

voila! Back in action!

Thanks Mr. Torvalds!!
:D

[Dark Ninja]

Originally posted by Phaete
Sometimes Linux is just amazing!
SOMETIMES! WHADDYA MEAN SOMETIMES!

;) It's ALL the time.

[fatTrav]

yeah, no sh*t. Linux is awesome ALL the freakin time.

ah, number 500, this reminds me of when I saw Griffey hit # 500....

btw Phaete, that is pretty cool what you did. i might try this out in a few days.

[Loki3]

Ahhh. Kodak moment. :D

[EnigmaOne]

Something new for me to try! Cool! :D

I already had this written-up and was going to post this to its own thread, but it looks like it'll fall right into the discussion...kind-of a "me too" posting, as much as I detest that kind of thing....but since Loki3 said, "Kodak moment," it just seems to fit even better. (My apologies in advance.)


Ever do something stupid, and Linux saves your caboose?
Yeah, probably more often than you realize; but then you come across a time when you know for certain that, if the same thing happened on a windoze machine, it would have crashed--hard--possibly (more like almost certainly) corrupting the filesystem on the way down....

My wife's USB drivers are screwed up on her windoze machine, and I haven't gotten around to 'un-hosing' them; so, when she needs to pull photos off her cameras smart media card, it's just easier to pop the card in my reader, move the .jpegs to my drive and route 'em to her over the network.

Last night, after a couple of SM-card dumps, we were watching a slideshow of the 170-something photos she took yesterday. I noticed that one of the images was rotated 90 degrees out of whack (something that seriously irks me--don't know why), so I right-clicked on the offending file and opened it with the GIMP. Of course, all the .jpgs were still selected from adding them to the KView slideshow list, so the GIMP happily began opening over 170 .jpeg files, each having a a size of anywhere from 1.8MB to 5MB.

My wife laughed, and then panicked a bit--believing the only copy of her photos to be in danger--as the machine chugged-down to a virtual crawl. (This, folks, is the unforseen reason I keep a 2GB swap partition, despite the supposed waste of drive space!)

I assured her that the machine won't crash, got up and went to the grocery store as she had asked me to do earlier. She gave me "the look" as I walked out the door, telling her that the machine most certainly wouldn't crash, and it's best just left alone "for now."

I got back about an hour later to find all photos opened to the monitor, and the machine processes toned-down enough to kill the GIMP through top. Swap partition sprucing-up then ensued, as my wife expressed high-order disbelief, and I copied her photos to the front Samba/print server. She was more than relieved, and is still flat-out amazed.

She spent the rest of the evening editing her photos on her machine, debating whether or not to allow me to set her up with a Linux/windoze dual-boot arrangement, reminding me that her machine would have crashed before the 13th iteration of the GIMP had initialized.

"I know, honey. I know. You'd have lost all your photos too. Ain't Linux great?" ;)

[Icarus]

You know EnigmaOne, you could of done a "Ctrl+Alt+F1 and "killall gimp" instead of just letting it go, right? ;)

Sure, it would be slow to open, but would of taken no more then 2 minutes in that situation

[EnigmaOne]

I actually had to stop myself, as that was my first instinct, but (don't tell on me) I figured I'd let her sweat it a bit.
She actually sat there and watched her photos come up, one-by-one, worrying that the machine would call it quits--the entire time I was gone. What an attention-getter that was!

Sooner or later, she'll take the dual-boot plunge--if I keep it up. ;) I feel sorry for people who have to come up with marketing-hype on a daily basis.

[blobaugh]

Yeah there has been many a time when my windows friends thought they had hosed their drives. I take them home and pop them in my hotswap copy the files of then fix the drive and toss the files back on. I'm getting many a convert that way

[EnigmaOne]

Originally posted by blobaugh
Yeah there has been many a time when my windows friends thought they had hosed their drives. I take them home and pop them in my hotswap copy the files of then fix the drive and toss the files back on. I'm getting many a convert that way

Seems a lot of my time has been spent on data recovery lately. I need to set up a schedule of rates instead of being so darn altruistic!

How's $40.00/GB sound to you?

[Icarus]

Originally posted by EnigmaOne
How's $40.00/GB sound to you? Cheap!
Where can I sign up? :p