About a year ago I learnt a lot about the wonders of LVM and what it could do for me, and as a result I very carefully transferred the /home, /var and swap partitions of my home PC from physical partitions into the LVM. Tempting fate this last year has been the last part of that task — to split the root partition into “/” and “/boot” and to move the root into LVM as well….
Well last Sunday I bit the bullet and tried to start. I carefully worked out a step-by-step method of transferring everything across, wrote them all out on a sheet of paper and worked through it all a couple of times — it all made sense. Then I started on it for real on the PC.
It all went horribly wrong, apparently the PC hadn’t read the sheet of paper and didn’t agree with me that it was a sensible sequence of steps. I ended up with a PC that wouldn’t boot, and rescue disks 5km away in a locked office.
Monday evening and I discovered that the ubuntu boot CD/rescue disk that works fine on the PC at work can’t be read completely on this PC.
Tuesday evening and I get too tired while trying to work out the intricacies of grub, boot partitions and boot images and managed to delete all the boot images rather than just the duplicate ones. Reinstallation seemed the only option… remembering to carefully not overwrite the data on my /home partition.
The rest of my spare time between then and now has been in reinstalling software that seems to be present, but is no longer in the DEB database. Highlights include:
- Fun and games with libGL.so.X.Y until I reinstalled Beryl from http://wiki.beryl-project.org/wiki/Install_Beryl_on_Ubuntu_Feisty. Oddly, Beryl used to work under Edgy, then stopped when I upgraded to Feisty, now its back again, wobbly windows and all.
- Trying very hard not to destroy the Cyrus mail spoolwhile installing cyrus2.2. Current state of play is that it is installed but not configured, so it won’t yet run.
