Story from the Shoot Yourself in the Foot Dept.

Jeremy Paul Bowers bowersj2@pilot.msu.edu
Thu, 24 May 2001 13:44:55 -0400 (EDT)


Edward Glowacki, you said. . .
>For whatever reason, a version of Linux I was using once only
>supported 128mb swap partitions.  I needed something like 1gb of
>swap, so I started making extra swap partitions... "mkswap /dev/hda4",
><up arrow>, <backspace>, "5", <enter>.  I was happily doing my
>repetative keystrokes until I finished /dev/hda10.  <up arrow>,
><backspace>, <enter>, "1"... *pause* .......
>"nnnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!"  My root filesystem
>became swap space, and that was the end of that... =)

I was making a boot floppy for my laptop. Instead of dd of=/dev/fd0, I did dd
of=/dev/hda, because I type hda so much more often then fd0.

The kicker is that I wasn't even root.  Many many moons ago, back when I first
started using Linux, I had set this particular user to have full permissions to
the hard drive, because _at the time_ it was one of the things I tried to allow
that user to mount the DOS/Windows portion of the hard drive.  Years later,
that little error came back to haunt me and totally hosed my hard drive,
including some date fairly precious to me that that harddrive had the only copy
of.

It actually took me a couple of days to come to grips with that loss...
seriously.  It was bad.

(For bonus points, all of that data was backed up on two other hard drives...
one of which had recently crashed and the other of which had recently been
wiped. Replicating the data was on the to-do list, but I didn't consider it
important. Oops.)

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-   * Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Freedom *   -
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