Well, that was...interesting
Mar. 21st, 2005 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuTwoson is here visiting with us this week during his spring break from high shool. Today I took him to spend his allowance at the computer and game stores. His big purchase for the month was Warhammer 40K Dawn of War, a realtime strategy game. He installed it on my computer in the Win98 partition and happily played it for a few hours. When he was done, I rebooted to go into Linux.
...and the boot loader crashed. I tried again. Same result. So I pulled out my Linux SUSE 9.0 install disks and booted from that, since you can use it to restore an installed system.
When the install program gave me the option, I told it to repair the existing linux installation. It could find no Linux partition and asked if I was sure Linux had been installed on this system.
Yes, I was sure. I tried again and saw that if the standard repair attempt didn't work, there was an option to use more advanced tools. I tried restoring lost partitions and restoring corrupted files and various other options, and in every case I got back a message that no valid Linux partition could be found on the hard drive.
So as near as I can figure, when the game installed itself, it simply paid no attention to the partitions and overwrote my linux partition, or enough of it to make it unrecoverable.
I've just spent the last hour or more reinstalling a bare bones SUSE 9.0 (and all current updates via YAST2). But all the image files I've downloaded, and all the Open Office files I've created, as well as my Hero Designer files and--most importantly--all my emails for most of the last year are kaput! Nothing is gone that I can't live without and/or replace, but it's very annoying.
I've been backing up my system, but the backups were on the computer--mostly backups of documents and the like. They were intended to be used after I'd repaired the Linux software with the install disk, to restore docs rather than programs (which are all backed up on disks). I didn't anticipate that the partition would be so completely hosed than an entirely new installation would be necessary. That's my error, I suppose--I really ought to have saved copies to physical media. Live and learn.
But as I say, I lost nothing irreplaceable--it's just damned annoying.
...and the boot loader crashed. I tried again. Same result. So I pulled out my Linux SUSE 9.0 install disks and booted from that, since you can use it to restore an installed system.
When the install program gave me the option, I told it to repair the existing linux installation. It could find no Linux partition and asked if I was sure Linux had been installed on this system.
Yes, I was sure. I tried again and saw that if the standard repair attempt didn't work, there was an option to use more advanced tools. I tried restoring lost partitions and restoring corrupted files and various other options, and in every case I got back a message that no valid Linux partition could be found on the hard drive.
So as near as I can figure, when the game installed itself, it simply paid no attention to the partitions and overwrote my linux partition, or enough of it to make it unrecoverable.
I've just spent the last hour or more reinstalling a bare bones SUSE 9.0 (and all current updates via YAST2). But all the image files I've downloaded, and all the Open Office files I've created, as well as my Hero Designer files and--most importantly--all my emails for most of the last year are kaput! Nothing is gone that I can't live without and/or replace, but it's very annoying.
I've been backing up my system, but the backups were on the computer--mostly backups of documents and the like. They were intended to be used after I'd repaired the Linux software with the install disk, to restore docs rather than programs (which are all backed up on disks). I didn't anticipate that the partition would be so completely hosed than an entirely new installation would be necessary. That's my error, I suppose--I really ought to have saved copies to physical media. Live and learn.
But as I say, I lost nothing irreplaceable--it's just damned annoying.
