Ok, so a geek-ish blog from me...

(posted by Leon)

(Apologies to the non-techies out there reading this blog! You may safely skip this entry.)

It's been a very long time since my last geek blog entry, so I thought to post this.

I have several partitions on my harddrive (on my main home PC). I run Windows on one, and Fedora on another, with the 3rd just a FAT32 data partition (to share data between Windows and Fedora). A few other little ones are also hanging around, like the swap partition for Fedora, Dell's recovery partition, etc.

Today I needed more space (who doesn't!?). So, seeing as I have a completely seperate PC running Fedora too, I decided to lay the axe to my Fedora copy on this PC. I booted off an Ubuntu 6 CD (which rocks, btw), and used the bundled GParted partitioning tool. I blew away the Fedora and swap partitions, and resized the FAT32 partition.

I rebooted. Oh dear.

I forgot that my Grub boot manager (the 2nd stage of it), lived inside my Fedora partition. So, my PC was dead. Error 22.

A quick reboot into Ubuntu again (why I didn't just use my wireless laptop evades me!), and a search on the Net later, I rebooted onto the WinXP CD, chose recovery mode, logged into C:\WINDOWS (by guessing the Administrator password is blank!), typed "fixmbr", IGNORED the serious warnings about dataloss (!!), and hit Yes.

Not breathing, I rebooted. Whew!! All good again. Thank heavens. (I omitted to say that I'm in the middle of a weekend oncall for work, so it was kinda urgent to get it fixed!).

All this space.....!? Now, if only someone would invent peer-to-peer downloads..... :-)