Installing Fedora Core 5 (Stupid Stupid Stupid)
Yesterday I downloaded the Fedora Core 5 (FC5) DVD image and burned it to disk. I started the installation today, and I wanted my father too see how easy installing it was. When it was time to setup up the partitions I mentioned that you would normally just allow anaconda to figure out that kinda stuff automatically, but that I had to do something special for my setup. I then proceeded into the custom partion setup screen and pointed anaconda to the already created /boot, / and /home partitions with the intention of leaving /home unchanged and format the rest. But since I wanted everything to seem very easy and quick in order not to scare my father I was a bit to quick to dismiss various dialogs and was met with a bright and crisp “Formatting /home” dialog when the installation started. Yeah!!
So, goodbye to the danish digital signature, the e-banking certificate, 5 years worth of emails, my gpg secret key, my ssh secret key and various documents and stuff. I could recreate some of the data from various sources but the emails and the gpg secret key remains lost. Sadly I did not create a certificate allowing me to revoke the secret key nor did I keep any backups of it on non-volatile media. In summation, I have been a total jackass today :|
Damn… that really sucks big time :-(
Having been through an upgrade to Fedora Core 5 as well, I was also somewhat surprised to see that the default option appeared to be destructive. Perhaps the Fedora Core team has made a bad decision there.
Yeah, it seems like a very bad idea indeed :(
And to top it all yum was completely broke after the installation emitting
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
errors.
I had to remove *db files in /var and rebuild the rpm databasein the fashion of Bug 181363.
crap, damn
That’s like every geek’s nightmare come true…. by the way, nice blog Thoooms :o)
Yeah, it’s nightmare on /dev/hda6 (or is it Elm street) here ;), and thanks.
What a nasty situation… :-(
Did you finish the installation anyway? If not (and if you turned off the power in time) then you might be able to recreate the partition table and get to your files. I believe the formatting wont actually overwrite your files, just the partition table, so a filesystem checker might be able to do something…
But unfortunately it is all theory and not something I have experience with :-(
Hmmm. I just had a similar thing happen to me. In my case, it was my own fault (sort of). I had Fedora Core 4–the x86_64 version–installed on an Athlon 64. My boss gave me the FC5 DVD and told me to upgrade. Without thinking about it I just started the upgrade and went home from work. This morning I discover that the DVD is the i386 version. I tried upgrading again, using the x86_64 version, and now the kernel panics. I’m using the rescue feature now to copy my home directory to another computer.
You didn’t try anything as stupid as I did, by any chance? (BTW, I really like Fedora)
No, I did manage to install the right version for my processor :).
Big boys don’t do backups, but cry often… 5 years is a lot of e,ail