GNULinux is MAGICAL!
I'm not saying this as mere words but I am saying this on the basis of
my personal experiences with it.
One day while working on my RedHat 8.0 I decided to repartition my harddisk
in order to utilise every available bit on my harddisk much more efficiently.
But as I was having only a single HDD(Hard Disk Drive) from Samsung of 40GB
I decided to leave my /home partition intact in order to preserve
my data. I also decided to make a separate partition for my
/home/rishi/General
folder. After partitioning when the installation program started formatting
my partitions I got shocked on seeing that it's also formatting my
/home/rishi/General
partition. After performing the whole installation when I viewed my
/home/rishi/General
folder which was a partition at that moment, lightening striked me. It was
empty with only trash & lost+found folders. I had lost all
my
data in
a couple of minutes. As Murphy has defined that you loose your data when
you are not having any Backup for it. I didn't tried any utility software &
managed to survive without the data that I had lost.
After about two months I decided again to repartition my HDD & this
time I deleted my /home/rishi/General partition & also left my
/home partition
intact to preserve the data in my /home partition. After performing the whole
installation procedure when I logged onto my machine & viewed my
/home/rishi
folder there was still a folder named General in it. When I clicked it I
was surprised to see all my data back, YA all my data that I had lost in the
previous partitioning is now
back as it was earlier before & without a single bit changed. First
I was unable to believe my eyes but finally realised that it's all true.
So what you will call this? You can call whatever you like but for me right
now it's GNULinux's MAGIC & it will remain a magic for me even
after
when I will understand the basic concept behind whole this. Ask yourself
honestly that how many OSs you know that can perform a magic like this, without
any utility software.
Now let us ponder a while to see that how & why actually this all
happened.
Partitioning first time I didn't deleted the /home/rishi/General folder.
Also I instructed the partitioning program to preserve my data on the /home
partition.
Moreover, I created a new partition from free area of the hard disk that was
not
a part
of the /home area.
So after installing the whole system when I viewed my /home/rishi/General
folder
I was actually
seeeing a newly created partition that is mounted as /home/rishi/General.
The partitioning program should have told me that I was not going to get the
contents
of my /home/rishi/General folder after the whole process although I have
selected to preserve
the contents of my /home partition, but unfortunately it didn't.
So when I repartitioned my hard disk & removed my /home/rishi/General partition
the system saw intelligently that I am having some data in the form of a
folder named General in /home/rishi as I have again choosed to preserve data
and
what it did is
that it recreated a folder named /home/rishi/General & removed
the mountpoint /home/rishi/General.
Although it may seem to be a simple thing but getting your lost data after
about
2 months
in a form it was there before is rightly to be called a MAGIC.
