On the Joys of Uninterruptable Power

Wait, that is a misleading or possibly even ironic title for this post, since I do not have a UPS. The fallout from this, unfortunately, is the complete pooching of my work desktop. I guess I'm getting ahead of myself.

On Friday afternoon, near the end of the day, I made a grievous error. I decided to upgrade my system from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04. There had been a couple of brown-outs over the course of the day, but I didn't think much of it. I began the upgrade.

"I began the upgrade." Boy, do I ever wish I could take that back.

So, the updates downloaded and started being applied. They're not small downloads - it took about 20 - 25 minutes to get them all (consider that I'm on a 100 Megabit, dedicated, just-for-me line). The application of the updates went fairly smoothly for about the first 80%. Then something bad happened.

The power flickered. Just for a second, nigh-unperceptively. It tripped the power of my computer. "Well," I thought. "No worries. I'll just reboot and recommence."

No dice. The boot process hung at the Ubuntu splash screen. I tried a few more times and gave up until this morning, when I booted into recovery mode. The analysis was, to say the least, not good: sda1 not found.

Now, I'll run the translation from Linush to Microsoftese. sda1 not found is pretty similar to Hey, where the hell's your C:/ drive?

So, thus far this morning, I have installed 7.04 on a separate partition, updated and upgraded as necessary (this post is coming from my work machine) and have everything just about working... except for my dual monitors, which I'm hoping to have done by lunch.

And that's the sort of day it's been.