A few weeks ago, I decided that my laptop needed a different Linux distribution. It has been running Gentoo Linux for a some years, but I don’t think anymore that Gentoo is the right choice for a laptop because you can’t just install anything when you are on the go. For those who don’t know, Gentoo is a flavor of Linux where you don’t use binares, you compile anything from source. That naturally takes some time and is hard to do when you are running on battery or don’t have much time.
Besides, I also removed Gentoo from my desktop more than a year ago. My new choice of Linux is Arch Linux right now. It works with binary packages (I didn’t know installing software could be that easy! 
), is optimized for newer processors (i686) and has a very good package manager.
So, the day before yesterday, I was installing Arch. It was already good on the way when I got the idea to check if the new kernel had built-in support for smart batteries (“SBS”, my laptop has on of those and back in 2004 there was almost no support for them in Linux). I was looking around somewhere in the /sys/ folder and catting some files to see their content. The machine then locked up, I couldn’t do anything except for doing a hard reset. I booted the Arch setup CD another time and from then on the hard disk didn’t work anymore. 
There it is, the broken disk, looking so innocent
Fortunately, I had saved my most important files on another computer. I just hadn’t saved some files from the laptop’s Windows partition. There wasn’t a lot of important data, but losing one file was very annoying: My Sacred character. I’m currently playing Sacred with my girlfriend and our characters are already level 34.
To compensate my loss I downloaded an unskilled dwarf of level 30. From there on, it shouldn’t be too hard to get back to 34.
A last word on my SBS battery: With a new hard disk, that set me back 45 € for a 120 GB 2.5″ disk, and Arch completely installed, it’s now working without any problems. I don’t know if I just read the wrong files in /sys/ or if the hard disk was already a little faulty…
July 18th, 2008 at 22:03:44
I react upon the signal word Sacred. I am playing the game too. If you played it with your girlfriend, you should have saved your hero on your disk. On the Sacred-website I once found a little tool a “hero management system” that should be helpful to locate and duplicate thise saves of heroes on other drives. You cannot change the past, but you can prepare for the future.
Hard disk crashes have been striking you quite often in the recent weeks. I guess that you will be safe for some time as Mr. Murphy will have to strike some other users first. I hope that your share of disasters will end with the laptop disk.
July 19th, 2008 at 13:33:59
Yes, of course, wiser now.
I also hope that I’m going to be spared from failures for some time now. But the good thing is back-ups have never been so attractive. Just in case, that should save me from more severe data losses.