The Case of the Corrupted Kernal Continues …
So, we finally decided to ship the thing back to IBM for warranty service. Okay. So, before we do that, we need to Ghost an image of the hard drive.
Hilarity ensues.
Well, not much hilarity. Just looooooooooong Ghosting. After all, there’s about 40Gb on that 60Gb hard drive.
And, um, a lot of it’s MP3 files which aren’t work-related. Etc.
Now, had I given it a thought (and gotten to the keyboard), I’d’ve wiped those off. Not because they’re non-work-related things, but because it would have an impact on the folks working on my machine and I have the frelling things backed up. So it would have been no loss to me, and would have helped the cause.
Didn’t think of it.
They finally got the Ghost image complete, and then went to the next step, to see if they could write it down to the hard drive on an alternative notebook. That’s got it’s own risks (different model), but there was a good chance it would work.
Except, of course, we don’t have any notebooks with 40Gb of drive space on them. Which means that the large number of unofficial files on my notebook (which is that way because, dammit, I carry the damn thing everywhere, work and home) not only slowed down the whole process, but made it impossible to complete.
*Sigh*
Okay, fine. Let’s trash My Music and My Picture — in fact, the whole Personal directory, too. Then upload it. I can restore those files when I need to. Okay?
Well, no. The hard drive, once Ghosted, was formatted to see if it detected anything wrong with it. Which it didn’t. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not the drive, but doesn’t indicate that it is.
Oooookay. Well, then, let’s reinstall that image back to the old hard drive, okay? Then we can delete these directories, cut off a good 10-15 Gb, and all’s right with the world, right?
Right. Except that there was a problem doing that, and now they have to recompile the Ghost image which, hopefully, will work, and then still …
- Reimage the old hard drive.
- Delete the junk.
- Create a new reduced Ghost image offline.
- Reinstall the reduced image on a new PC with a smaller hard drive.
All of those steps have something that could go wrong with them. And it’s going to be at least until COB tomorrow that I’ll know whether I’ll have “my system” (or a reimaged version of it) to work from, or whether that will have to wait the inevitable 3-6 weeks for IBM to scratch their heads and figure out what the problem is.
Rrg.