Cut off the branch
A cartoon comes to mind; the wily coyote runs off the edge of a cliff and realizes that something is wrong. Or imagine an intrepid woodcutter, deftly chopping off the branch where he is seated. In the IT (computers for the rest of you), it’s classed as erasing your boot sector.
And that’s what I did, this afternoon. Suddenly, my computer wasn’t as ready for the rigours of the workplace as it might have been. Things were quiet, and I decided to do a little housekeeping. Erase the accumulation of software that gets installed and then abandoned after testing. Defragment the drive. Decide to get rid of those unidentified partitions and recover the space for more appropriate corporate use. Click, click, reboot. And then…
GRUB was angry. Who? Oh (fill in the blank with a favoured expletive). That GRUB. From that Linux partition that was tested last year. On a daily basis, there was no “boot menu”, but that only means that things were out of sight. And now I’d woken the sleeping bear (a grub and a bear have a lot in common).
This is my job. I fix stupid errors. Even my own. On the desktop, there are a set of “distro” CDs, for the various operating systems that are in play around here. Without hesitation (but with a quick Google lookup on the smartphone to get the syntax correct), I reboots and dropped to the CLI. Several keystrokes later, I rebooted with a spring in my step. The windows could be opened. Business as usual.
