DDS Trio of Woes

Technology Mar 17, 2005

DDS (David’s Data Server) is in a spot of trouble. Actually 3 spots.
To recount: it has 4 hard drives, 1 floppy and no CD nor DVD. Linux and Windows are installed – on the first drive – and working. A boot menu – LILO – lets me boot either.
All seemed right. But then, 3 things went wrong in rapid succession.
[1]Linux / ran out of space
I run Debian Linux – Woody (latest, stable). During an Internet-based update of some software, the main (and only ‘user’) disk area became 100% full.

For the geeks, this is the / filesystem. Ouch. /usr, /var, etc etc are ‘within’ this FS.
Mmm. Tried a few things and ended up deciding to squash-down the main Windows partition that shares the same physical disk. It’s got GB of free space as I’ve purge off most, but not all, of my Windows data. Then I could expand the / partition thing for Linux to use.
[2] Windows corruption due to partition error
In trying to solve [1] this happened. Midway through resizing (shrinking) Windows XP’s main C: drive, the partitioning software aborted. Crashed. Terminated.
Hard.
In a mild panic, I rebooted. Boot manager reappeared (phew). Default item of Linux started. And worked 100% okay. One down, one to go. Windows.
Now don’t forget, I know I haven’t got all my user-data off Windows yet.
So I rebooted, took the boot manager menu item for Windows. It started! Woo hoo.
Then it hard-crashed with a Blue Screen of Death. Windows is quite sick.
I spent the rest of the day trying everything I know, plus some. But she won’t boot Windows. The good news is that Linux can ‘see’ the Windows partitions and they appear to be fine. But without a CD drive to try a recovery-install, things look, umm, challenging.
[3]Linux networking went out in sympathy
It decided to not talk to the LAN and/or Internet. Or talk to it very slowly or intermittently and with heaps of packet-errors. The Ethernet card seems to be either a cheapie or non-standard; it needed a download of a kernel module to (half) work. Mmm.
So from being happy about DDS I’m now in sad land. Lots of thinking to do.