software

Trying to build the unofficial Sarge DVD images for AMD64 today, jigdo-lite could not find several packages on the regular mirrors. Next it tried to fallback to amd64-cdsnap.debian.net, which I believe is a mirror listed in the jigdo template, but still failed to find them over there. Browsing the port pages, I found out that the Sarge release for amd64 is hosted on amd64.debian.net rather than that -cdsnap location. It seems those jigdo templates need an update...

It so happened that my ibook had a 8GiB free space area at the end of the hard drive, and therefore I decided to wanted to use that for MacOS X instead of the 2GiB partition that was used for it before. Trying to avoid problems with bad partitions, I booted from the OSX installation/rescue CD and opened Disk Utility.

To play safe, I locked the existing OSX partition for editing and then assigned the 8GiB free space area to a new hfs+ partition. When I committed, suddenly the existing partition label went blank. WTF??? Had Disk Utility decided it should format what that partition as well? Great, now I'd have to reinstall anyway instead of copying things over.

I rebooted to check partition numbers in linux, but instead of the yaboot prompt I got an alternating question mark / happy face, and after a couple of seconds it booted from the rescue CD again which was still in there. Apparently my bootstrap partition got messed with too. Not funny.

I powered off and inserted a bootable linux CD to chroot into the existing system and rerun ybin. However when I tried to mount the linux root partition it would not want to do so. I checked the partition numbers with fdisk and suddenly my stomach felt like it was tied into a knot: instead of using only the free space as told, Disk Utility had wiped the entire drive and created a 2GiB partition at the beginning and assigned the remaining 28GiB to the new partition instead.

So now I'm left with a ibook shaped paperweight for the time being. Luckily I did not keep anything really important on the laptop, but I did lose some uncommitted programming work, and some of my wife's old mail. Not to mention the time I'll lose by being unable to use it the first few days and having to reinstall it instead. So people: never trust a tool tailored for dummies to something as important as disk partitioning. And to Apple: FIX THE FUCKING PROGRAM SO IT DOES AS IS IT TOLD TO DO AND NOTHING ELSE!