My Life as a Cautionary Tale
So I was really excited to use Jeremy's Redhat 8.0 mirror via HTTP at work today - we have a fat bandwidth, but a firewall that slows down FTP to useless speeds. I had downloaded the first two CDs on Monday and Tuesday, so with the third CD I was ready to go.
After I got home this evening I burned the CDs and grabbed my extra hard drive, the one from the other laptop we have that's died - it's a twin of my Dell Latitude with super flaky power and major bios problems, so it's dead. Which is isn't that bad since it was Ana's and she wasn't really using it anyways and now I can use that hard drive as a spare. Anyone who's read this blog for a while will remember when I copied all her files over to my other Latitude and then installed Mandrake on that spare drive.
Anyways, tonight I was all set to check out Bluecurve so I grabbed the Redhat CDs, swapped the drives out of my laptop and started the install over what was Mandrake, but when I got to Redhat's disc 2, it was bad - I hadn't gone through the initial disk-check setup like I should have (DOH!) so I had to STOP the installation, swap out discs and re-burn the .ISO - this time it was fine - I was trying to do to much with my machine during the original burn - so I rebooted and reformatted and installed Redhat 8.0. Woohoo! 45 minutes later I was playing with the finest lookin' UI on Linux!
Bluecurve is very nice, actually - it's a lot more cooked than Mandrake. Even little things like pointer-control had been reworked to be a lot better. The install was clean and simple and the desktop looks awesome. Definitely recommended. I happily played around for a bit and dragged Ana over to play with Linux for the first time and she was dutily impressed (she had another idea totally in mind when it came to Linux). But after a while I decided to get some real work done, and because I don't have access to my ADSL line because of it's win-only USB modem, I had to swap over to Windows again.
Did anyone reading the last two paragraphs find my mistake?
Yep.
That's right.
I forgot to swap my hard-drives before installing Redhat.
It's gone. Everything. Gone. For some reason, a couple weeks ago I bought a 25-pack of CDRWs ready to go... and haven't used any of them except to back up some pics and Ana's file (during her original move). All my emails for the past 8 months (since my last backup) gone. Dev work? Pretty much gone. Graphics? Passwords? Documents? Software keys? Any digital photos from the past several weeks? Gone, gone, gone.
I just got Win2k Installed again and my ADSL and am starting the long road back to recovery... it's going to be a long evening. For those of you reading this right now, do yourself a favor. BACK UP. I've been wandering around my apartment during the re-install looking for "phantom" back-up CDs that I'm sure I must have made. How could I be so stupid to go for so long without making a backup? I must have made a backup... it's got to be here somewhere... maybe I put in with the baby-clothes for safe-keeping? It must be here somewhere...
Excuse me while I keep looking...
-Russ