The Importance of Backing Up
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006Today, I was trying to get LightScribe to work. I run Gentoo Linux and Windows Vista RC2. Neither one of these supports LightScribe. So, I decide to use my GParted cd (it’s a partitioning Linux LiveCD). I go into it and find out that I can’t make any more primary partitions; I already have 4. I was planning to shrink my NTFS partition, wipe my SWAP partition and then make an extended partition and place the SWAP and another NTFS or FAT32 filesystem in there as well (XP or 98 SE respectively). I do this and go to boot my XP CD but it won’t boot. Not a problem, I’ll go with 98 SE (hey, it takes up less drive space anyway). Pop the CD in, reboot… long long long story short (I rebooted probably 30 times before it got to this point), it told me it was going to reformat the C:\ drive (known to me as /dev/sda6; the FAT32 parition), but what it really did was reformat the entire drive.
I have learned 2 lessons today:
1) Back up more often. I backed up my pictures last month, but my main backup is from April 21st of this year.
2) Never ever trust a Microsoft product to format any section of your drive.



