Dell’s MediaDirect killed my hard disk today, in the sense that “killed” means “overwrote a big swath of space including part of the LVM PV.” AGAIN.
I can definitely say at this point that it has something to do with booting a Live image off the optical drive. The last time this happened, I had booted off the Fedora 8 Desktop Live CD, and this time it was the Electronics Lab Live CD. (Note that I am decidedly NOT blaming the Live images in anyway; this seems like some sort of nefarious Dell BIOS issue.)
After shutting down the Live image properly, and restarting the system, I was greeted once again by my arch-nemesis, the Dell MediaDirect splash screen, at which point my stomach plummeted to somewhere around the second floor of my building. Just what I needed with two days left in the office!
Fortunately I’d recently moved all the mail I wanted to hold onto into my GMail folders via IMAP, so my email’s perfectly safe. Unfortunately I lost my growing “To Do” list. Ah well, at least there wasn’t much on there I don’t have elsewhere. Board Supermegawhipmeister John Poelstra will probably remind me of the rest, likely with the business end of a cat o’nine tails. ?
Paul,
Thought I’d mention HiveMinder as an idea for keeping TODO lists. It does quite a bit including let you send it IMs to add a TODO. Unfortunately, its not free software atm, but was created by the people who created RT, Best Practical.
Cheers,
Clint