Well, I had a fairly major IT disaster last night.

I’d decided that I wanted to move away from booting multiple Linux distros. There’s a reasonable maintanance overhead, and with me only wanting to install them to see what they’re like, it really makes more sense to use virtualisation, especially since that’s something else I’ve been meaning to take a look at.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, I do like my eye candy. And there’s no doubt that SuSE and Mandriva’s grub menus are a lot nicer to look at than Ubuntu’s plain old ncurses one.

So I did some digging, and found out how to setup gfxmenu on Ubuntu, and proceeded to switch over.

Big mistake. I don’t know quite what it did, but the NTFS filestructure on my PC’s windows drive (the boot device for the PC) was irretrievably corrupted. I noticed Ubuntu was having problems reading it, and when I tried to reboot, it just wasn’t happening. After digging around, it became clear that the NTFS file structure on the drive had been completely hosed, and the only thing to do was a complete reformat.

So, I’m now rebuilding my Windows installation piece-by-piece, while trying not to think too hard about what files I’ve lost. Fortunately I bought a 500Gb external drive over Christmas, so I’ve not lost as much as I might’ve, but I’ve still probably lost most of my save games (especially any recent ones), and anything in my iTunes from that last few months (some purchases, and a few audiobooks I’ve ripped).

Once I’ve got the basics of the Windows system sorted out, I’ll plugin the external drive and see what I do and don’t have, but at the moment its just gutting.

So take heed people. NCurses is pretty enough. And backup regularly.

As a side-note, I also completely wiped and reinstalled Ubuntu, not wishing to risk having a dodgy grub installation repeat the mistake. That gave me a few oddities that didn’t happen when I was upgrading to Hardy rather than clean installing, so I’ll have to remember to post about that experience.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 11:26 and is filed under Technology. 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.