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The weekend of September 9-10, just a week after Labour Day, was a tense time over a kernel panic. Actually, I believe my primary hard drive crashed and died. But that’s in retrospect.

So I’ve decided to interrupt my series of lessons to share my experience, because there are some key lessons there for you if you are new to a Linux computer environment.

On Saturday, between doing cleaning chores inside and out of the house, I usually do a backup and update my computer. Those take time, so they can do their thing while I’m doing other stuff. This time I did my upgrade first and noticed it was delivering a new kernel. There was a note to reboot, but I was busy so I put it off all day. Forgot about it in fact, until Sunday morning when I tried to open my computer for my prayer journalling.

What?! Not able to login? What’s this screen full of error messages?

I didn’t have time to deal with all that, so I shut the computer down and hurried off to church. Later, about 5 PM I decided to find out what was up.

I was able to get to a login screen, but only got into my older SUSE 9.3 operating system which is on the second hard drive. I dug in for some hours of research on those error messages. The SUSE 10.1 edition I had installed last fall was just locked to me. Finally, about 11 PM I went to bed, when I realized I was too sleepy to make good decisions. Because I’ve lost files in the past because of hasty decisions, I was trying to be patient and deliberate in the things I tried.

Monday I went back at it right after breakfast. I tried various things I had learned the night before, including repairs from the installation DVD. When I found myself going in circles, I logged back into the older working system, Suse 9.3, and did more research. I even brought my meals to the computer to break this deadlock the sooner.

Well, I took time to go out to welcome the gift of a used garden shed when it arrived. But then I was back at this computer.

About mid-evening I came to the conclusion that the computer wouldn’t let me fix anything on the older primary hard drive. When this computer was given to me several years ago, the owner told me the hard drive (10 GB) might go on me. I had no problems with it. It was bigger and faster than the 6.2 GB drive that came with the computer I bought in 1999, and which started my online adventures. But a few years ago when high speed came to my small town, and I realized that this computer had the required ethernet card I decided to transfer the 40 GB drive I had bought for the older computer to this one, and make this my main computer. Up to now I’ve had no problem running at least two operating systems on here, (and now I’m VERY glad I did!)

My solution in the end, was to re-install SUSE 10.1 again, but make sure all of it, especially the bootloader, were on the bigger newer drive. (The installation process would NOT let me touch the old hard drive).

My BIOS doesn’t show that 40 GB drive. I guess the old one is old toast now, and I should get help to switch the larger one to the Primary position. But whew, at about 12:30 am I knew that things were going to work, and I went to bed rejoicing that I was able to keep my personal files untouched for both systems through all this. The following morning I just had to find time to change font sizes in all areas back to what I like.

During the install i ended up entering my user profile twice and once as a ‘guest.’ This ended up being a hassle because now I was suppose to switch users all the time at login and shutdown. It took me another couple of days to discover where to change the settings so that my old user profile logged in automatically, and the others were deleted.

Well, except for the ‘guest’ user. I keep that one in place so that if ever I’m showing someone else how my SUSE 10.1 system works, I can log in there, and they never get to see my personal files. It just provides me a bit of security for private stuff.

But yes, I lost some time over one full day and a bit more, but now I’m back into my old busy work routines again, and wiser for the experience.

Main lessons to learn here;
Patience, patience! Don’t rush or you may lose important data
A dual boot computer with more than one system on it can be a huge blessing for problem solving.
Faithfully, regularly do back-ups. You never know when you may have to-reinstall your system, and though that is not too hard, your personally created files are NOT on the installation disk.

Oh, another thing; during the re-install, I was very careful not to set any partitions for reformatting that had my files on them, even though I did resize some to make room for the /root and bootloader. That proved to be extremely wise in not losing them. Not everyone may realize that if you are new to installing Linux.