“The RoseBouquet”

I gave up most of my newly scheduled writing time last week to producing a press release on behalf of Western Tract Mission, and emailing it to 16 newspapers to announce this week, that next week Monday we are doing a huge mailing blitz to send a gospel booklet out to every mailing address in 10 cities in Saskatchewan.

But then over this last weekend I have been tied up with a computer crisis. I will probably describe it in greater detail in my Linux Learning Curve blog, which I write every other Thursday morning. (http://BouquetofEnterprises.biz/eAction/archives/category/linux-learning-curve/). However, I’ll try to give a short version here.

On Saturday, between doing cleaning chores inside and out of the house, I usually do a backup and update my computer. Those take time, so they can do their thing while I’m doing other stuff. This time I did my upgrade first and noticed it was delivering a new kernel. There was a note to reboot, but I was busy so I put it off all day. Forgot about it in fact, until Sunday morning when I tried to open my computer for my prayer journalling.

What?! Not able to login? What’s this screen full of error messages?

I didn’t have time to deal with all that, so I shut the computer down and hurried off to church. Later, about 5 PM I decided to find out what was up.

I was able to get to a login screen, but only get into my older SUSE 9.3 operating system which is on the second hard drive. I dug in for some hours of research on those error messages. The SUSE 10.1 edition I had installed last fall was just locked to me. Finally, about 11 PM I went to bed, when I realized I was too sleepy to make good decisions. Because I’ve lost files in the past because of hasty decisions, I was trying to be patient and deliberate in the things I tried.

Yesterday I went back at it right after breakfast. I tried various things I had learned the night before, including repairs from the installation DVD. When I found myself going in circles, I logged back into the older working system, and did more research. I even brought my meals to the computer to break this deadlock the sooner.

Well, I took time to go out to welcome the garden shed when it arrived. But then I was back at it. About mid-evening I came to the conclusion that the computer wouldn’t let me fix anything on the older primary hard drive. When this computer was given to me several years ago, the owner told me the hard drive (10 GB) might go on me. I had no problems with it. It was bigger and faster than the 6.2 GB drive that came with the computer I bought in 1999, and which started my online adventures. But a few years ago when high speed came to Hague, and I realized that this computer had the required ethernet card I decided to transfer the 40 GB drive I had bought for the older computer to this one, and make this my main computer. Up to now I’ve had no problem running at least two operating systems on here, (and now I’m VERY glad I did!)

My solution in the end, was to re-install SUSE 10.1 again, but make sure all of it, especially the bootloader, were on the bigger newer drive. I guess the old one is old toast now. But whew, all of that took me until 12:35 am last night! I went to bed rejoicing that I was able to keep my personal files untouched for both systems through all this. I just have to find time to change font sizes in all areas back to what I like. Maybe a bit of other fine-tuning.