Nearly pear shaped
Thanks to Señor atún, I have a new motherboard. Alas, linux is not very happy about changing drive ids around, ie from hde3 to hdc3, even when I changed the fstab to point to the new places -- it kept saying the fsck failed cos it could not find hde5. So, cleverly, to avoid that problem, I moved the drives around so the drive with the linux build would appear under the same name as before.
Well, turn out that, for some reason, it decdied it would just delete the whole linux partition. I'm guessing it was thinking something like "hrm... it looks ok, but something is not quite right here... Perhaps I should just zero the file table -- that ought to fix the problem". the fact that linux does this should make gaius_octavian a bit smug.
Fortunately, when I first set up the drive 10 years ago, I decided it would be a bad idea to put the user data on the same partition as the linux build. Of course I only remembered that after an hour of frantic holyshitholyshithowtoIrecoverthisholyshitholyshit.
So now I have working hardware, and two working drives, minus one rather useful partition. I can probably recover most of it with a bit of effort ("strings /dev/hde3" turns up lots of recognisable text), but I may as well just grab any useful config or text files, let the rest go and install something new.
After I figure out a way to back up the remaining stuff, of course.
Well, turn out that, for some reason, it decdied it would just delete the whole linux partition. I'm guessing it was thinking something like "hrm... it looks ok, but something is not quite right here... Perhaps I should just zero the file table -- that ought to fix the problem". the fact that linux does this should make gaius_octavian a bit smug.
Fortunately, when I first set up the drive 10 years ago, I decided it would be a bad idea to put the user data on the same partition as the linux build. Of course I only remembered that after an hour of frantic holyshitholyshithowtoIrecoverthisholyshitholyshit.
So now I have working hardware, and two working drives, minus one rather useful partition. I can probably recover most of it with a bit of effort ("strings /dev/hde3" turns up lots of recognisable text), but I may as well just grab any useful config or text files, let the rest go and install something new.
After I figure out a way to back up the remaining stuff, of course.