In which our brave hero valiantly battles the forces of corrupted hard drives.

This morning, when I came into the office and checked my e-mail, something was very odd. The RSS news stuff in Thunderbird was all strange; much of it didn’t seem to have any body. I’d left the virtual machine running all night, as I do with a couple of my Windows machines (like this notebook), and I’d left Skype and Thunderbird running too.

With a sense of foreboding, I told the virtual machine to reboot. It shut down okay, but refused to come back up. The text on the screen said that the file system was damaged and I had to run “fsck” manually, and demanded the root password before it would let me do anything else. As the root password was set randomly, I didn’t know it.

Fortunately, I had the older install of the OS on another virtual drive. I was able to connect both virtual drives to it simultaneously, boot off of the other one, and use it to fix the main one. If I hadn’t had that, I could probably have done the same with the original CD.

With my primary virtual drive thoroughly fsck’d, I was back in business. (And the first thing I did was change the root password back to something I would remember, so that if this happens again, I can easily get to the command line to fix the problem.) After all the stuff the fsck program had complained about, I was worried that I’d lost some data — I hadn’t yet made a backup after getting Thunderbird working properly yesterday. But all of my e-mail files seem fine. I made a backup of them immediately anyway.

That’s about all I had time for today. Tomorrow, and over the weekend I plan to continue with the software search. I also plan to do a few experiments to see what might have caused the problem… hopefully without reproducing it. 🙂