Adding to today's failures...
Sep. 1st, 2010 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs
Reserve
It didn't come up. Fuck me twice. And worse, I couldn't restore! Because the problem was in the "Unified Device Driver" (udevd), which, in upgrading from revision 149 to revision 151 had somehow forgotten how to recognize my hard drive, and the kernel has become so dependent upon udevd that there's no manual override. I'm looking at the hard drive shouting "It's right fucking there!" and of course it doesn't listen, it has no ears.
So I boot off an ancient (very ancient) Gentoo Rescue Disk, only to discover it has no SATA drivers.
By luck, I have a (very) old version of the kernel that doesn't use udevd sitting on the hard drive, and through deep geekery force the boot loader to find it. It comes up. But no, it has no ethernet capability, because that was shifted from the IPW subsystem to the IWL subsystem several years ago, and this kernel is too old to use IWL!
USB Stick! I boot up my ancient desktop, which I never use. It can't recognize USB devices. I just rebuilt the goddamn thing, and it doesn't recognize USB storage devices!
Desperate, I shove the USB stick into Omaha's macintosh, scp the files for the udevd downgrade into the known address there, then shove the USB into the laptop. Blessed be, it recognize the files and downgrades successfully. A reboot later, and I'm back up and running.
Linux is great when it works, but tonight, trying to get my creaking desktop and my crippled laptop to exchange a single goddamn application archive was like trying to get two autistic children to talk to each other.
I'm now re-backing up from the current (working) endpoint. I'm embarrassed I had to use a Mac, but I suppose this makes up for Omaha needing my Linux box to pull files off her borked Mac harddrive a few months ago.
Oh, and I covered the back of my screen, and the backs of the USB drives, with velcro. Works great to keep them out of the way.
