Diary Entry For: Sunday the 26th of November 2000

Trust me to mess-up a perfectly good computer. Last night, after installing an updated version of XMMS, I found that suddenly, despite having removed the old version from the system, I was now using all 1.1Gb of the /usr partition of my hard drive (for any non-UNIX users reading, this is the area of the system where programs are installed). I wasn't alltogether pleased about this as I'm pretty sure XMMS isn't around 300Mb in size - and if it is, I certainly don't want it on my system. So I deleted it, only to find that I was still using all 1.1Gb of /usr.

As anyone who has been reading these entries for a while will know, my technical expertise leaves something to be desired when it comes to odd problems like this. I'm perfectly happy to sit and fiddle with the system to make sure it works, I'll happily set-up a firewall if someone tells me where a HOWTO on the subject can be found (if you're interested, try the Linux Documentation Project) and I've been compiling Linux kernels since kernel 2.0.36 (kernel 2.4.0 is coming out soon, so it's been a while). All this aside though, I still can't get my head 'round hard drive erorrs!

So I looked around the system to see what was amiss. There must be something, but I'll be damned if I could work out what. So I fell back on my experience from the world of Windows and began the ages-old practice of backup everything important and reboot the system with an installation disk.

That was last night. When the installation stalled while trying to download encryption software I gave up and went to bed. It was about 3am by then anyway.

It's now 4:19pm. The system is up and running again, without me losing any of my precious files from the /home partition (where each of the computer's users has their own separate area for storing their files). I'd backed them up just in case, but I'm glad the backups aren't needed 'cause I'd backed them up to floppy disk and it takes ages to get the stuff back off them.

Now all I need to do it redownload all the updates for my software. Only another hour or so to go...