[ale] Yes, you can hack up a reiser file system!

[griffisb at bellsouth.net (BruceG)]

I popped a machine in my 15 year old son's room a few weeks ago. Did the 
"never shut it off by hitting the power switch" talk. Well, he couldn't start 
it up yesterday, just hung in the middle of the boot sequence.

Booted off a Knoppix CD. Mounted the hard disk to look at it. Unmounted it and 
did a "reiserfsck /dev/hda2 --check". Hmmm, return code of 2, seriously 
hacked up file system. Did the "reiserfsck /dev/hda2 --rebuild-tree" and 
crossed fingers. 

Back up and running. Phew!!! I've been doing backups on my main desktop, but 
haven't yet set up backups on that machine. Think it's time to try Mondo on 
Debian Testing. Just have to figure out NFS. Ouch. Think I'll back up his 
desktop to the main desktop using NFS, and continue backing up the main 
machine to tape.

So, moral of the story:
Don't hit the power switch!!!
Learn those file system test and repair commands (I leafed through a few pages 
in two books to find relevant information)
Figure out and DO those backups from each machine