One Dastardly Weekend

It seems that when smart people do stupid things, the stupidity of the stupid thing increases in the volumetric value of its stupidness. I like to consider myself a smart person, but I might have to downgrade myself based on what I did this weekend. Of course, since this is teh intarwebs, I’m going to share the extent of my stupidity in the hopes that others might not delve where I’ve gone. So, what did I do on Saturday afternoon which warrants so much personal loathing and this discourse for the public good?

I almost killed my MacBook Pro.

Most assuredly, as if I had picked up a kitchen knife and plunged between the shoulder blades of Barney The Dinosaur, I clicked the wrong “Delete” button. Here’s some history. I have a 15″ glossy-screen MacBook Pro 2.33GHz with 3GBs of RAM. When the Boot Camp beta came out, I held off, but a few months before 10.5 came out, I took the plunge. I had a copy of the RTM of Vista Ultimate from Microsoft, so I installed that to a 32GB partition which the utility created on the then 160GB stock drive. I had issues with Vista right away, so I yanked it and installed XP Pro in its place.

When Leopard I received a 320GB drive from Western Digital when those were first introduced. It took me three hours to install the drive and that was the time when I reviewed the drive, covering its installation and the drive enclosure I got from MacAlly. I did a standing upgrade just to see what would happen. Everything worked out well, so I reinstalled Boot Camp, this time with an 80GB partition and back to try Vista again, allowing for the possibility that a few updates might actually make a difference. They didn’t. It was back to XP Pro SP2 after three weeks with Vista and things went well for a while (though I did note that Half-Life 2 did run better under Vista than under XP Pro, which is likely a driver thing).

Time progressed and I eventually ditched even XP since I was never in it and always using VMware’s superb Fusion to run a local VM. I will admit that I’m a periodic gamer. I cycle through periods of gaming, usually when I get a new game, which isn’t very often. I also always cheat. I can’t win these games without cheating, much less get past the first few levels. I’ve tried to not cheat up until I got stymied, then I’d just cheat. The one game I am unable to cheat on is Call of Duty 2 for the Mac, which I nearly finished before I accidentally deleted it. Really kick ass game, which is a lot coming from me, Mr. Lamer Gamer.

After I got rid of Windows for what I thought would be good, I installed ReFIt, which I had heard good things about, and installed OpenSUSE 10.3 into a 50GB partition. I really enjoy Linux these days and, in my estimation, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Debian are the best distros out there (in order of complexity). For Mac users, if you want or need a Linux distro, go with Ubuntu which is designed to work a lot like the Mac. I’m also pleased with Debian because they are still compiling their most recent versions for PowerPC systems. Fedora is, too, and its looking better.

My only problem was that I couldn’t get OpenSUSE to work with the LILO bootloader through ReFIt. I tried my own tricks and followed various processes, but could never get it to boot without the CD. Feh. Then I got two things in the mail. One was a guide to using Server 2008 as a workstation, which I posted about last week. The other was a guide to yanking some of the crap out of Vista so that it would be more stable. I resolved to try both, and aimed to start with Vista. I have a bum SuperDrive in my MBP (I’m outta warranty and did NOT purchase AppleCare), so I ran it through my external DVD drive.

When I got to the partitioning page and clicked Advanced I did the following:

1. I examined the partition map while watching The Legend of 1900 on IFC
2. I selected a very small partition (approx. 6GBs) and deleted it
3. I noted a single partition for 35GBs which watching the movie on IFC
4. My brain told me that I had allocated 50GB, so I selected the large partition
5. I watched a scene where 1900 was able to light a cigarette on the piano strings after playing a rather furious improvisational piece
6. I clicked the Delete button.

It was then that I actually looked at what I was doing and that the partition which I just deleted was 249GBs and not 50GB. My wife thought I was having a heart attack. I just kept staring at the screen in disbelief at what I had just done. I had deleted my the partition definition for my Mac OS X installation. I finally came around and was able to take in the situation and shut the machine down. Sadly, the damage had already been done, and I blame myself for 80% and Microsoft for the other 20. Its unbelievable that Microsoft hasn’t figured out how to develop a partition manager which allows you to examine your new partition scheme before committing to it.

So, there you have it. Had I not been graciously provided with a copy of ProSoft’s Data Rescue II a few months before, I would not have been able to recover my data. I have since been able to wipe the drive, embue it with a single HFS+ partition, install Leopard, and thumb my nose at Boot Camp. My only wish I would have ProSoft grant Drive Genius 2 would be the ability to locate and restore deleted partition maps, though I’m rather impressed with the utilities other capabilities, which are manifold.

So, the moral of the story is to backup your stuff. Use Retrospect or Time Machine or whatever you like, just make regular, scheduled backups of your data and periodically verify that you can recover data from that backup. Don’t be a Tyler, backup. While I didn’t lose anything, I did misplace my ability to perform a clean install on my own time and on my own terms. I also lost all of that time I had to spend on getting everything back and installed and fetching copies of the applications I was using to install again. There is a cost in that which few people take into consideration. Please, dear lord, learn your lessons from this doofus. Please!