/ borked

The title will already give an idea of what happened to my laptop two days ago. Due to a bus problem and a forced reboot, my root partition got corrupted. Luckily no data was lost as I keep /usr and /home separated from the rest. However reinstalling proved to be a very difficult task.

First of all, my DVD drive has some problems, and so it wouldn’t read the Kubuntu Feisty install disk I had brought from work. I tried then using a thumb drive but no luck, this buggy BIOS does not allow USB boot. I then copied the disk over to a DVD-RW I had, following my brother’s suggestion. So I was able to boot.

Problems didn’t end here as the DVD had trouble reading, so I had to try about three times, then jumping into expert mode to install the base system. When I tried to install the rest, some packages wouldn’t install. I had to make sure I could boot via HD, then I used the Ethernet connection to download and fix the broken packages.  It took me three hours or so yesterday.

Then I still had some odd hangs or the kernel log filled with “drive not ready for command”. It came to me that I was using laptop-mode, which my HD did not like. As soon as I disabled it, the kernel messages stopped. I’ll be monitoring the situation and see.