[techtalk] Oops... I really did it this time

[Lothan]

I always knew that Linux (and *nix) in general was rather finicky when it
comes to the disk cache, but I never realized just how finicky it can be
until last night. To make a long story short, I was attempting to plug in an
audio cable into the back of one of the computers when my knee accidentally
bumped the power switch on the Linux box. Oops! I got everything situated,
powered on the Linux box and stared in disbelief at the disaster that
struck... USB module not found... Sound Blaster PCI module not found... eth0
init failed. No biggie, I'll just dig out the appropriate modules and
reinstall them from CD... /dev/cdrom has invalid major or minor number.
Oops. I dig out the floppy... /dev/fd0 not found. Uh oh! ls -l /dev/f* shows
no files. Grrr! ls -l /dev/e* shows no files. Grrr! ls -l /dev/* shows only
the hdd and tty files... most of which have invalid major or minor numbers.
Oh sh*t!

On the up side, I now have a completely fresh install of Redhat Linux 7.0.
One thing I found rather interesting is that the Redhat installer
automatically reinstalled everything by itself without asking me beyond
selecting which desktop I wanted. Looks like it just picked up the installed
packages list from the hard drive.