A Week of Mondays

much newer. I decided it was time to finally upgrade her to Ubuntu and get her on the same distro and release we have with the rest of the linux users at work. I knew Ubuntu was the solution to the problem. I should have realized something was wrong when the USB fob I plugged into her machine didn’t show up as having any data on it. In reality it had several gigs worth of data on it. I’d figured I had just wiped it and gotten it ready for further use. So, I rsync’d her data to this fob and double-checked. On her machine, it appeared that her data was there. Cool, on to phase two. Phase two consisted of a complete hard drive repartition & reformat, and installation of the Ubuntu OS. During this phase I found out she only had 512mb of RAM in her machine. One upgrade later and she was now at 2gb. Then I had issues with the keyboard and mouse. A new USB kb with integrated hub took care of that. When I finished the initial installation, the original problem resurfaced, and I decided it was all because of the video card. So I swapped it out for a new one. Things started working again. That done, I set the sources.list file to point to my in-house apt repository and updated all the software. After that, I configured the dual-head display and got that working. Then I added a user account, for her and plugged the fob in to finish the migration. The OS found the fob, mounted it, and showed the contents in a file browser window. It showed everything that was on the fob before I started working on this migration, and none of her data. Ever had that sinking feeling like somebody’s just killed that lovable puppy that was your best friend? Yeah, it was something like that. To lose a user’s data so completely is something I had never expected I’d do. Especially when I was sure the precautions I was taking were correct. It’s something I’ve always dreaded doing, and it’s a feeling I’d like never to have again. Since then, I’ve thought how I could have done it differently, including my original thought – to rsync her data to another machine on the network. I believe my line of thinking when THAT thought first crossed my mind was, “oh, using a USB memory stick would be much faster and easier to do.” Yeah, hindsight is always 20/20. Anyway, after everything was said and done, I created the user account and password, then left a note saying to see me before she logged in. When I told her the bad news, I’m not sure she really understood exactly what I mean when I said, “I lost all your data on your machine. It’s all gone.” I was nearly in tears at this point. The happy mood I had for the first two or three hours at work was completely gone, and I was just devastated. She told me that her really important work stuff in on the dev boxes anyway, so she wasn’t really that concerned. I mentioned that while I was doing the backup, I saw lots of photos and stuff, but she wasn’t too concerned. I then remembered that I’d not configured her printer, so I walked with her back to her desk. After logging in, we had an error, “Failed to initialize HAL services”. I’d seen it before, but didn’t think much of it. I figured a reboot would take care of it, so continued on. First, I configured her email, but then I started working on getting the printer working. The printer configuration panel started giving us problems, so I decided to log out and back in to see if that fixed it. (It didn’t.) I also couldn’t do it as one of the admin users on the machine. Huh. I rebooted, and expected better… At which point the original problem returned. ARRRRGH!!!! When I went back down to my office, Andy suggested replacing the box, that the system board was probably bad. We did, and the problems went away. So I spent four hours working on this user’s machine, lost all her local data, and endured all this stress when I could have just swapped out the box and avoided all this mess. There are times when I hate my life. Oh well. Live and learn, I guess. I’m going to try and see if that data isn’t magically on the fob somehow, but I have a sneaky suspicion that what I was writing to wasn’t the fob, but the internal hard drive. And to top it all off, I still didn’t get my backup server migrated to the new hardware. Dammit! Well, that’s it from me for now. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>