social.noyu.me

girlfriend switched to linux recently and today her laptop decided that the root filesystem partition no longer exists so I'm going to be doing my best attempt at btrfs data recovery for her overnight

I don't think 2026 is gonna be the year of the Linux desktop

underrated advantages of windows over linux:

• when the boot process fails it will give you an error message instead of hanging forever (the way systemd handles fstab entries is awful)
• while it probably can't fix this specific issue, windows auto-repairs broken boot configs

you know what's really cool? this dd operation copying the hypothesised btrfs partition from an nvme ssd connected via a usb-c nvme dock to an encrypted file on the internal nvme ssd in this laptop is proceeding at 255 MB/s. that's more than twice as fast as gigabit ethernet!

happy to report that I correctly located the btrfs filesystem and was able to mount a copy of it; I was then able to recreate its partition table entry on the real disk, and her laptop now boots fedora again. hooray!

but I must ask: how the fuck does a partition just disappear?!

(supernintendo chalmers voice) spontaneous data corruption? at this time of year, in this part of the country, localised entirely within the extended boot record that happens to proceed the root filesystem?

@hikari yes!

@hikari Recently I've been thinking about the number of times I've had to manually delete stale gpg locks because my computer crashed.

I mean, I can do it but it's the sort of thing that makes me very reluctant to recommend Linux to people.

But I'm also reluctant to recommend the other two so the whole thing is a wash.