starcrow and reiserfsck
Yesterday was not a good day for me. My gateway and development machine called starcrow (Jan Cogo’s spaceship) have had some problems lately, so some weeks ago I ordered a new machine that will replace it. There are some issues with the chipset on the mainboard on the new computer and linux, so I have not been able to get it up yet (not like that you perv!). I was kinda hoping that my old gateway would live a bit longer.
Yesterday I was coding away when I suddenly heard some pretty f*cked up noises from the basement where starcrow is. Suddenly I lost my internet connection and the fans on starcrow went silent. It turns out that the system disk on starcrow died a horrible death. I was kinda expecting this so I was still calm.
When I moved to my new apartment this summer I was moved to another provider and I got a new IP address and I had to use another gateway and bla bla bla. I could not remember all this, so I thought I could just connect to the internet using my mobile phone so I could set up my laptop to connect directly instead of via my now deceased gateway. I rebooted my laptop to get into windows (I have not set up the bluetooth stuff in linux yet) and then I saw some strange error messages fly by. I had to boot into linux again to see what was going on, and now something really scary happened… I could not mount anything because I could not write to /etc/mtab … WTF?! I kinda panicked and did not know what to do. I managed to get the laptop I got from work online and asked Mats (you know him as the guy who invented the Web 2.0 term) for some help. After some stupid questions later we kinda figured that the / partition was somewhat f*cked. I fired up a rescue cd and ran reiserfsck on the / partition and it said I had to use the –rebuild-tree option to fix the partition. That was fine I thought since I could just mount another partition to back up the important stuff on /… oh wait … /etc/mtab is not writable, so I could not mount anything. :( Beeing the wild child that I am I just went for it! I ran reiserfsck with the –rebuild-tree option without any backup and lo, everything went fine. :)
Hopefully I will get my new shiny gateway online soon!
