So yeah...I was trying to set up a VMWare virtual machine, and no matter what OS I tried to install, I would get errors. I poked around and noticed that a file in my /tmp directory was eating up ALL my disk space. A file with no owner...
Well, I can't delete it, so I go to single user mode...and still can't delete it. Oh joy!
Time to bust out the trusty Knoppix boot DVD. I run reiserfsck and find errors. Big surprise there. I run it again to fix and proceed to corrupt the partition even more. (Oh, by the way, this is my / partition, which is separate from my /home partition, thank god!!!). Of course the on-screen instructions DONT TELL YOU to --scan-whole-partition when you run reiserfsck --rebuild-tree ( it should be reiserfsck --scan-whole-partition --rebuild-tree /dev/hda1). So I proceeded to fubar my root partition beyond all recognition. Guess who didn't make backups???
I managed to clear space off my trusty 40GB IBM SCSI HD, and try to install Ubuntu Edgy Eft. 6 attempts later...I give up (due to some horrific installer bugs) and try Dapper Drake. I don't know what the hell is wrong with my box...but only the Xubuntu 6.06 installer worked. All the other installers hung at some point. Hey, maybe my RAM is bad. I'll start Memcheck before going to bed.
But anyway...my rant is coming to a close. Lesson learned...BACK UP YOUR SHIT. I had tweaked this box for almost 2 years running (thank you Debian/Ubuntu for in-place distro updates!) and I lost a LOT of config files...not to mention weeks of work logs, journal entries, and wiki entries stored in my /var/www folder.
Today sucked.
UPDATE: It was bad RAM.
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