Post by johnno56 on Nov 14, 2020 13:48:37 GMT -6
Minor heart attack - not literal - on Friday evening.
My wife had given me a USB memory stick, that she found in the depths of her handbag, then proceeded to 'check it out'.
Cool. An unused stick. Fired up the disk utility and formatted the stick... just in case... Nice 'clean' stick.
Proceeded to create a 'bootable' USB as I was planning on upgrading my OS, The procedure was taking far too long and terminated the application. Best to reformat the USB and try again.
Oh. Guess who didn't check to see if it was the USB that was selected for formatting? No prizes given...
This function too was taking to long... Then I noticed the disk utility had selected the main OS drive....
Oh. Guess who also didn't perform a backup? I figured, "It's only a USB. Why backup the system?"
All my work, from the past year, gone. (or so I thought...)
Obviously the PC would not boot. I had an OS on a bootable USB and fired up the system. Examined the HDD to determine the 'damage'. The format had removed the "boot" directory. The OS and my Home directory were still in tact. Placed the HDD into an external HDD holder. Place the spare drive in another holder. The idea was to 'copy' the Home directory to the spare drive...
Because I booted from the USB OS, the USB OS 'user' was 'not' the same user that 'owned' the Home directory... So much for copying.
Installed the new OS on the spare drive; Reconnected the old OS into the PC. Now the 'owners' of both drives are the same... The Home directory of the old drive was copied successfully. It was now 1am on Saturday morning and the grandkids are visiting at lunchtime... The next few hours were used in re-installing all their favourite games....
My new OS has a much better backup system...
My wife had given me a USB memory stick, that she found in the depths of her handbag, then proceeded to 'check it out'.
Cool. An unused stick. Fired up the disk utility and formatted the stick... just in case... Nice 'clean' stick.
Proceeded to create a 'bootable' USB as I was planning on upgrading my OS, The procedure was taking far too long and terminated the application. Best to reformat the USB and try again.
Oh. Guess who didn't check to see if it was the USB that was selected for formatting? No prizes given...
This function too was taking to long... Then I noticed the disk utility had selected the main OS drive....
Oh. Guess who also didn't perform a backup? I figured, "It's only a USB. Why backup the system?"
All my work, from the past year, gone. (or so I thought...)
Obviously the PC would not boot. I had an OS on a bootable USB and fired up the system. Examined the HDD to determine the 'damage'. The format had removed the "boot" directory. The OS and my Home directory were still in tact. Placed the HDD into an external HDD holder. Place the spare drive in another holder. The idea was to 'copy' the Home directory to the spare drive...
Because I booted from the USB OS, the USB OS 'user' was 'not' the same user that 'owned' the Home directory... So much for copying.
Installed the new OS on the spare drive; Reconnected the old OS into the PC. Now the 'owners' of both drives are the same... The Home directory of the old drive was copied successfully. It was now 1am on Saturday morning and the grandkids are visiting at lunchtime... The next few hours were used in re-installing all their favourite games....
My new OS has a much better backup system...
