Never take anything for granted…
Well, today I was investigating xania.org’s dodgy disk. So I ran fdisk and checked out the partition table on both drives (hda is the main / and /usr drive, hdb is the ‘home’ disk). I had completely and utterly forgotten my machine’s past — it used to be a work machine, and while perusing both drives I discovered no less than 6 other partitions, including a full windows installation still there! hda is a 10Gb drive and I’m currently only using 1.6Gb of it… hdb is a 3Gb disk and I’m using 2Gb of it — there’s another 1Gb ext-2 formatted, blank partition on it! Mad, I feel such a wally. I’m going to back up the relevant data on the windows drives and then I might try and move everything onto hda, and use ext3 or something l33t. Then I can use hdb as a pure backup device or similar. I still haven’t worked out the SMART imminent failure thing though — I guess I’m still hoping that’ll ‘go away’ magically. So far on 2.6.4 no maddening kernel messages about things going breast-up though at least!
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.