Mokona Modoki

Well the evening actually

While at work today, I booted up my laptop and walked away. Unfortunately I missed the grub loader (only has like 3 seconds) and linux started to boot up. Why is this an issue you ask? Well while I am at work, it is easier for me to work in Windows, and use Cygwin when required, or use the Linux Terminal Server. This is based on the fact that the network and domain where I work is based on Windows. I also have a machine of my own at Aawsom, that only has Linux on it. So working in Windows on my laptop at work is no hassel for me. I'm still getting my daily dose of Linux. Anyway! Without wanting to have to wait through the linux startup, I pressed the power button on my laptop to kill it so I could start it again in Windows. Oh boy! I think I did that for the last time (too many times before), because when I took my laptop home this afternoon, ready to start it up in Linux as I always do, it wouldn't boot. The errors indicated to me that there were problems with the root partition, but I couldn't repair it because I couldn't get a prompt. In the end I tried the FC4 rescue CD. Failed. So I booted up my Knoppix CD. It wouldn't mount the partition within X, but would at a console. So I rebooted again into Knoppix and ran fsck -vf (fsck is the file system checker and -vf is -verbose & force if marked clean). That took a few minutes or so but returned some messages telling me the file system had been modified. Normally I am terrified when I see that error, but this evening, I was pleased to see it! After that I rebooted and what do you know?! Here I am right now on my laptop writing this post! Success obviously! I posted this because I want people to realise that just because it looks like the end of the world, doesn't mean that it is. Try other options before formatting! I certainly wasn't about to lose all the work I had been doing all day!

The Quince Man