Very Bad Thing Make Compy Go Boom

Last week I got very excited at the big update to Slackware-current. For one thing, KDE4 hadn't worked for me at all when it was in -testing ... BUT the partition I had Slack installed on was nearly out of space. So I fired up the GParted LiveCD ...

... and did something Very Bad (and also Very Very Stupid, considering I'd done it before and really should have known better): by deleting a small waste partition and attempting to shove things around so that Slackware would have more breathing room, I essentially RENUMBERED THE PARTITIONS so that, when the machine was restarted, grub couldn't find anything and the laptop was best regarded as a high-tech bookend.

I booted a gNewsense liveCD, which allowed me to burn a copy of System Rescue to disk; however, when I booted that and tried to make my way around, I got stuck in the menu system for a partition manager called GAG (I think): there was no exit option so, frustrated, I left.

(I must mention at this point that I had NO Slackware rescue CD handy: I had some bootdisks, but the kernels were too old! I realize this ups my SQ -- Stupidity Quotient -- considerably. Sigh).

Then, having heard good things about Puppy Linux, I loaded gNewsense again and burned that & rebooted.

... attempting to run diagnostics on the various partitions (which Puppy makes available) turned up really weird things: mentions of corrupted boot blocks, etc ... but when the called-for reiserfs diagnostics were run on the partitions they reported out no problems!

I read in a few places on the 'Net that GParted can sometimes do this. Meh.

Anyhoo, what I eventually did was install Puppy to my hard drive and use it as a base of operations. I moved critical data from the Slackware partition to Puppy and began rebuilding Slackware. This is actually a good thing: it allowed me to try out ext3 (I'm freaked out a bit by the whole Hans Reiser situation) and start from a cleaner slate.

I am unsure what to do with the Puppy installation -- the damn distro is a lifesaver since it will run completely from RAM, and it is blazing fast. But I can't help but think of a distro that doesn't have standard man pages as extremely, well, quirky.

So we'll see. But it suuuuure feels good to have Slack back. It was the distro I started with back in 1999 and it is still my favorite. I have occasionally drifted away, but I have always come back.