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Linux @lemmy.ml DidacticDumbass @lemmy.one 1 yr. ago

Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?

I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.

For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files... and all I saw was a distro.

It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.

So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think... It might be a tremendous fuck up.

See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.

EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though...

96 comments

THANK YOU EVERYONE who recommended PHOTOREC! This community is fantastic.
- You might be able to rebuild your partitions with testdisk, too. Work from a backup.
  
  Neat. I will try that once photorec finishes its search in like a month from now.
Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:

Don't do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you're tired and should be sleeping.

dd is nicknamed 'disk destroyer' for good reason.
- 😵‍💫 the 3am tinkering, it calls to me 😵‍💫
  
  Never dd at 3am, kids.
- Disconnect all other drives
- When using dd, check the command before pressing enter, then check it again for good measure.
  
  then replace dd with cat or cp.
- ... no use in dd to write an image to disk. Just use cat/cp/pv...
  
  dd is a scalpell, not a shovel.
  
  Useless use of dd
- Oh, am I talking to myself? Hah.
  
  Yeah, I wish I had all the stuff I torrented in high school. Lost treasure.
- Late to the party but this why I like Ventoy. It only looks for removable drives and then all you do is drag and drop your live images onto the removable drive. Pretty hard to mess anything up.
Before you perform another task on that hard drive, try photorec. You might be able to get a majority of your files back if they're important
- I guess I can try it, since I did not like, wipe everything.
I remember shortly after college I was living with a couple of people and one day we all heard “NOOOOOOOOOO!” and went running to see what tragedy happened. He had started formatting the one porn drive he had been collecting on over the last few years.
- That is is a special kind grieving.
  
  I’ll never forget that scream, I thought a sound like that was reserved for when the cat ran behind the couch and stepped on the surge protector button, corrupting the hard drive as you were almost finished writing your graduate thesis, which wasn’t backed up yet.
Make a donation to the testdisk author!
- I will! These programs are amazing.
Expecting things to be different.
- The differences do seem enormous when one first encounters linux. They shrink every install though, but it takes some time for the magic to wear off.
I accidentally formatted a drive with a Bitcoin wallet on it. Back a number of years ago. Fun times.
- Oof. I mean... yes. Oof.
Installing GNOME on Kubuntu I think, hahaaha.
- DEs get so wonky if you try to change them. I wish it was easier to compartmentalize an envirionment.
  
  Its possible using homedir backup etc. Or on Fedora Atomic simply switching desktops. But yeah Desktops are all over the place, having a ~/.kde folder where EVERYTHING is stored would be great.
- Installed Manjaro sway and now i want back to xfce, but i really dont want to reinstall again...
I got started in Linux about 15 years ago. I'm not skilled nor a techie but knowledgeable enough to make things work. After running endless cracked windows machines I switched to Linux and started distro hopping. But I didn't have enough money at the time to afford a lot of hard drive space.

I remember going from one distro to another while trying to transfer a couple of GBs worth of work on the same drive. Two GB of data was a big deal to me at the time. At one point late one night after about the tenth distro attempt, I wiped an entire drive worth of my unbacked up work. Worst moment of digital loss I ever had.

I've kept double triple and quadruple backups since then .... and I still worry about losing data.
- That is haunting.
  
  I tend to be pretty cavalier with my data, because only recently have I started amassing anything of value (starting to be the adult I needed to be 10 years ago).
  
  Yes... I have some storage shopping to do.
  
  It was waaay past midnight when I made my mistake. I should have been sleeping at least 3 hours before.
It sounds like you need to learn about disk forensics before you go any further. Check out FTK
- Hah, I don't think I illustrated how dumb I am. I deleted the partitions already.
  
  Unless it was encrypted, it prob doesn’t matter. The partition table is just the road map that points to the houses (files). A tool like FTK or PhotoRec goes byte by byte to find the files and figure out what they are. You won’t have file names, but the data might still be there.
  
  Oh, I’ve nuked partitions in the past before, and was able to recover using photorec, when doing it, just make sure you don’t save the files to the drive you’re running recovery on
  
  Also, all of us have done things because we didn’t know better. The only dumb thing to do here is to not learn how to fix this. Try and fail, so next time you know how it works and can do better.
  
  You can still recover.
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that's actually good advice.

The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.

Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.

I'm sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
- There is a way to recover it. You can use a root shell aka recovery shell (usually available through your GRUB menu) to change the permissions on your home directory. But just reinstalling was probably easier anyway.
- All you really would've need to do is update the ownership via root user, which you can actually do from the installer. Kinda funny cause you already went through the process of mounting and running the installer, so you were already there.
I’m concerned at the number of people who boot new OS’s without backing up their computer.
- Thank you for your concern, hah!
  
  Yeah, I admit the mistake happened long before last night.
  
  Appreciate the good humor on your part! I’m just being a bit tongue in cheek but PSA: everyone should follow 3-2-1 backup protocol! You’ll never lose your data again!
  
  3 backups
  2 formats
  1 off-site
  
  So I recommend everyone get 2 decent HDD’s (2nd is clone of 1st) and 1TB of cloud storage. Most services are under $100/yr and let me tell you, you’ll want to spend 5x that to save half of what you lose without it. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to follow this system.
I wiped my drive with a lot of non-backed-up data on it intentionally because the Fedora installer was too confusing. Lost among other things my Celeste and Minecraft saves, a lot of images, and other stuff with sentimental value.
- Unless you meant to destroy all of that data, that was unintentional not intentional.
  
  It was intentional, it was just also dumb and a bad decision
- Damn. I am sorry for that loss. I agree, I am always boggled every time I use the Fedora installer. I don't know how I clicked the wrong disk. I didn't read close enough, or I don't know.
  
  I hope the new things you make are better than what was wiped.
  
  Tbh I don't even remember much of the stuff that I lost anymore. I had a lot of images, a legally downloaded series, a good amount of legally downloaded music that I keep forgetting I don't have on my phone, the aforementioned game saves, and I don't remember more rn. I was luckily more creative during school so the more important stuff (Siberian sniper crocodile) was on another device.
I've done rm -rf / twice on Fedora installs.
- I think I have done that a couple of times intentionally. Seems like one of those cognitive dangers that is harmful because you know it.
I once nuked a 6TB drive full of Steam games. Started a full format of the drive. Didn't realize until it was too late.
- Wow. If I could teleport you some cake I would invite you to take it. That is a lot. I cannot imagine how long it took to redownload.
Reading this thread makes me appreciate Macrium Reflect and my 64TB worth of redundant backup drives even more.
- I might need to look into building a storage server of some kind. That is super cool.
  
  Personally, I keep the redundant backup as cold storage to minimize loss. Three 8TB content or archival drives that are always attached via USB but not powered until needed, plus another on NAS for streaming, and two more 8TB each for double backup that are only turned on when I want to do a sync. So the drives get minimal wear, and whenever a primary dies, the backups get promoted and a new one is bought to be third in line. I have lost too much data in the past. As well as I can manage, never ever again.
Correct. We are used to look at computers like if they're tools. Actually they're environments.
- I look at mine like they're toys lol
Those aren't fuckups they are learning experiences. Now you know what that does in that situation.
- Yes! I am becoming more careful. I am definitely getting deeper in my knowledge of programs and linux. The stuff to learn is immense. But, it makes my life so much better.
Nothing special, I just kept distrohopping and backing up my home folder to a seperate drive each time via rsync. Eventually I messed that up somewhere, some data was lost. I think that was early this year.
Nothing to major, bit of a nuisance is all. And a grim reminder that eventually you WILL mess up. It's just a matter of time really. So try to minimize the factors that lead to mishaps like distrohopping and be diligent with your backups.
- Hah. That was my strategy, but manually.
  
  I need to learn backup tools proper.
  
  Of course, it happens when your data is at its most valuable.
dd'ed an ISO onto the system drive instead of a USB stick. Luckily, the first partition was the Windows one, so not too important; and the rest I recovered from the GPT backup table.
- Nice! I need to learn recovery methods. I am so used to scorch earthing an install when it goes wrong, which is not useful.
I tried dual-booting Manjaro from my Ubuntu install, since VMs were slow on my machine at the time and I wanted to give Manjaro a try.

Manjaro wouldn't boot (X11 sessions crashes on boot), and then when I returned to Ubuntu, I got dropped straight to the GRUB rescue shell because I had shrunk the partition from the Manjaro installer, and it had fucked up the Ubuntu install :/ so instead of two OSes I had none
- I feel like I have done that too, but long time ago. I always got confused with dual booting. I get weird trying to calculate how much to space to give each partition.
  
  Making partitions by hand is a pain though.
Wrecked my first Ubuntu install over the course of 2 years, wanted something new and tried Arch. The 4th time pacman wrecked my system I moved to Fedora at around F20 and have been happy ever since. I tried Gentoo in there somewhere, and managed to install it, but just the install burned me out. That was back when the Sakaki guide was one of the only ways to install on UEFI except with Fedora.

I would say my biggest mistake was not understanding the scope of Linux and that something like Arch and Gentoo are more for a CS grad student level of user.

I have a much better understanding of operating system design principals and architectures now, but I still prefer Fedora, really because the Anaconda system, Nvidia kernel driver build system, and UEFI shim are the best system for Linux I have encountered. The bootloader is one of the largest vulnerabilities in modern computers.
- Something I am learning is that an install of a distro can last as long as you want it to.
  
  Curiosity leads us to mistakes, but more often to things much cooler than what we knew before!
  
  A computer is like a second home the more I think about it.
  
  I am glad you learned a lot from those experiences!
- Nowadays, you have options like endeavorOS.
distrohopping in general,

not having a seperate /home partition.

using roling release distros.

i hopped way to often for miniscule diffrences.
i now know, what de i want, i dont care about the package managers.
i prefer fresh fresh packages with access to nonfree stuff (fuck you nvidia), unless its a server.
the rest just doesnt matter.

i stressed out way to much about diskspace, to splitt home into a seperate partition, when it would have made the occasional reinstall so much easier.

roling release distros are overrated,
just use latest.

normal updates broke my roling distros fare more than an occasional version upgrade.
The first dumb thing is distro hopping to start with.

Distro are not that different in practice, just pick one and go on with your life.
- Debian based, arch based, rhel based are all somewhat different and have different package managers (with flatpak, appimage and snap that might be less important nowadays though)
  
  Nobara comes with all the stuff for gaming, not everyone who uses Linux knows exactly what they need to install themselves
  
  NixOS is fantastic and drastically different from all the others
  
  NixOS, silverblue, vanilla are all immutable which makes a massive difference
  
  Also not everyone wants to install their own DE, so if they want something like cinnamon, pantheon, KDE they need a distro that comes with it preinstalled
- You are right. I was happy with linux mint, and before that MX Linux. This is all just bike shedding. I spend a lot of time setting things up Hell, I spend too much time just downloading crap because I have not bothered to make a script that would automate installation of the apps I use.
  
  Yeah, I think I will.

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