Well, it’s windy, raining, with what looks to be a lot more to come on the Marathon radar. It looks like a low, verging on a tropical depression, as hurricane season really gets into the swing of things. So what’s the plan for today? Drive forty miles toward Key West, and get on a boat to go out snorkeling. Really. The captain says it will be fine.

Well, it’s no skin off his nose if we drive an hour each way for nothing.

[Update a few minutes later]

We cancelled, after looking at the radar again. Off to Key West instead. If this rain keeps up, it might actually be pleasant (i.e., not blistering hot) there today.

We drove down to Marathon yesterday afternoon, after picking up some friends from Michigan at the Fort Lauderdale airport. We have Internet where we’re staying, but between snorkeling, kayaking, Sunfishing et al, blogging may be light for a few days.

And yes, I know it will be hot down there. But it’s what they want to do.

…and finally doing final editing on my New Atlantis piece, so blogging will remain light until then.

I’ve got a hardware problem of some kind.

I put in a brand new terabyte drive and installed Fedora 11 on it. As I was doing some package updates, the screen froze, just as it did yesterday, when all the trouble started. When I tried to reboot, it didn’t even recognize the drive as a system disk. I rescued it, and fsck said the boot sector was clean (I don’t know if that means no problems, or it has no data).

I did a full memory check overnight last night, so I don’t think it’s that. Maybe Carl had the right idea about a bad video card, but how would that cause it to trash the hard drive? Any other ideas?

For those following my travails yesterday, there’s good news, and bad news (and the bad news may be really bad). This morning, it finally logged me in, but it takes half a forever from the time I type in the password and I actually get a desktop. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I can’t find my old data where I backed it up yesterday.

I had backed it up to a file system on sdb3. But when I went to look for it today after logging in, /dev/sdb3 no longer exists. All there is is /dev/sdb1. And when I try to mount it I get the message “type lvm2pv not recognized.” Just how screwed am I?

[Update]

I’m hosed. Sort of, depending on whether or not I can find a wizard. Fedora decided, without asking me, to format both my drives as a single file system. The data’s still there, but not easily found. To top it off, the second drive is dying (which I didn’t learn until this morning). So I’ve shut down the machine, and am going out to buy a new big drive, load a fresh OS on it (without the other drives present), and then see how to go about the recovery. Fortunately, the data is redundant on both drives, which may make it a little easier to find, even with the superblocks and tables munged.

[Update mid afternoon]

In doing the new install, I’m pretty confident that I fornicated with the canine. It probably asked me if I wanted to format both drives, and I didn’t look carefully enough at what it was asking me. But Fedora started the whole thing…