eAction

June 2005

Tuesday morning, I opened KWord in my Mandrake 9.1 which was on a separate drive from my Windows 98. I pulled up some files on a floppy disk from my old 286 computer downstairs (which I use only for super private stuff). The first one I had converted to RTF and it opened okay, but when I opened the second one, KWord “hung up” or greyed out, and I couldn’t close it or do anything with it. In Windows-lingo, it crashed.

In Linux lingo, I know now that I just needed to give the “kill” command for that one program, and I could open it again and start over. However, I didn’t know that yet.

I spent from about 9:30 to 11:30 searching online for how to deal with this. I knew that in a Linux operating system one should NOT shut down and reboot to solve a crash. That’s a Windows’ cure. But I got impatient and decided to shut down and reboot.

Only now I couldn’t get into Mandrake. It was all seized up! I re-installed my Mandrake suite, but on the empty half of the 40GB drive, just in case I could fix the first installation. When I came into my NEW Mandrake, my cursor was missing. I struggled to fix it, but couldn’t get into the area of Mandrake Control, for the settings as I couldn’t see where the mouse was clicking.

In the afternoon (sigh!) I re-installed Mandrake again. Still the same problem. I explored the SuSE LIVE! CD (it stays on the CD, not the hard drive), and via SuSE was able to see that my partitions were still all there, so I went to look for answers on the net, with my older computer, using dial-up. I couldn’t find anything really helpful, so in the evening I came back and installed Mandrake again for the 3rd time.

While in the custom partitioning stage I decided to risk a Rescue partition click. My sister-in-law Penny called, and I was talking to her when it stopped and I saw my hard drive wiped clean! Both Mandrake installations all gone!

As I moaned and grieved Penny tried to comfort me by saying it was all just “stuff.” People matter more than our stuff.

I know all that! I usually always put people first.

What she didn’t know was how many web sites I’ve been working on, how many writing projects, graphics… and not all for just me - clients too.

I still had stuff on the 10 GB drive with Windows, but it had been locked off to me since Easter when I had a crash because of some virus from a popup ad. What I had lost now, was all the stuff I’d gathered and set up since Easter. I had not been able to figure out how to do backups to CDs, but had been saving everything to a separate partition on this drive. If I had NOT tried that “Rescue Partition” button I would still have it. (SIGH!)

I finished that third install. (I was getting VERY familiar with that routine), and late that night I hunted up manuals and instructions on backups. I was resolved not to do anything else until I had learned how to do backups on CDs. Close to midnight I went to bed, feeling odd. Like I ought to be physically sick. My heart was certainly in mourning.

All of the next two days I sought out and managed to learn a steep mountain of information. Finally I could do backups on a program sitting right there in my Mandrake suite of over 900 programs. It was called X-CD-Roast. I also learned a number of commands to use in the Konsole like a real Geek.

I still needed to learn more about changing file permissions, but I thought it is safe now to try to re-build my “stuff” in that Mandrake operating system. Remembering my move to this computer in November of 2004, and my transition into Mandrake only after Easter I realized that it would take a few weeks. All my big blogging plans were on hold.

I was able to download my sites and the ones I look after, so I had copies of them again, but the work I had not uploaded yet… well, I had to do it over.

Same with the kids’ book I’d started on the previous weekend, and the article I wrote Saturday night for the local weekly paper’s centennial project. A big batch of graphics I had cropped and re-sized, all had to be done over. About 80+ tracts that I had scanned for a shopping cart - need to be done over. Never mind all my email addresses. If certain friends would not write me, I had no way of getting to them!