I've had it in my head for a while that I wanted to check into the state of Linux today, having not messed with anything Unix-like in literally like 15+ years (yes, I'm that old).

I saw that Ubuntu has a new Live disc out, so I DLed it, burned it. Googled a few things like this handy dandy guide from LifeHacker about running Ubuntu nicely along side Windows 7. Seemed easy enough so I figured I'd give it a go tonight now that the wife and kid are asleep.

Now, for the more experienced IT folks out there, back in college, I was a bit of a computer wiz. I even served some time early in my career doing desktop support and was one of my undergrad university's first web masters. I was also webmaster (and co-editor) for for one of the sites that was the pre-cursor to what is now IGN.  So I'm not exactly an idiot when it comes to tech.  But time marches on and naturally, because it's not my job any more, I'm not nearly as up to speed as I was back in the day (and I was never a Linux guru exactly). Computers are a fun hobby for me.

So to cut to the chase, I was screwing around with setting up Ubuntu on my home gaming rig which is a Core i7 960, 12GB of RAM, dual 1TB HDDs in a Raid 0 array - which is run by an on-board raid controller. Not really important for this but on the GPU side I'm using a Geforce 295 in this rig, which I'll probably upgrade to the next spin of whatever follows the GF 480. 

Now, don't ask why I picked my gaming machine to do this. I should have set it up on one of my home servers that had been properly backed up. I have 2 media servers (one of which is largely idle and could have been scrubbed for this experiment), and a backup server also in my house.

To make a long story short, I screwed up my hardware based harddrive partitions by playing with software partitions as instructed in the guide. All data go boom.

It's not a huge deal as there's no work files, documents or media on my gaming rig. It's purely a gaming rig.  I did manage to salvage some of the game saves and such mounting the drive in Ubuntu and throwing it across to one of my servers. I keep Chrome synced to keep all of my bookmarks and stuff consistent everywhere. I'm just reinstalling windows 7 as we speak. Once I fire up Steam and set a ton of stuff to reinstall, I'll call it a night.

Note to self, you aren't smart enough to do that... next time, no raid 0 for joo on an Ubuntu dual boot install. That's like real admin stuff that I'm too out of the loop to do any more.