On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 07:17:53AM -0700, Chris Tillman wrote: > On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 10:36:53AM -0400, karrottop wrote: > > I have got a bit of a problem. I installed Debian on a G4 tower > > and I have no idea why but it looks like linux installed itself on > > my HFS partition that I have a lot of documents etc on. <snip> > > I would assume that their is some utility I can use to recover > > from this, be it a mac app or a linux app...any suggestions?
I did this once, and it's a horrible feeling. But all I can really offer you is sympathy. It's just like your house burning down or your computer getting stolen: everything's gone, and you just have to start again from scratch. Norton Utilities has some facility for scanning your disk for fragments of deleted files, but with Debian already overwritten on a (presumably) large portion of the partition, you're not going to get much. But, of course, as Chris Tillman pointed out, you should know exactly why linux "installed itself" on that partition: because you told it to. There is no more infuriating, disappointing, hopeless mistake one can make on a computer. But once I made it, I tried to turn my loss into relief: very rarely in life do we start with a completely clean slate, and after putting a lot of yourself into files on your computer and then losing those files (a year after the partitioning incident I my iBook was stolen, so this has happened to me twice, one way or another) your slate is about as clean as it can be. I've started making backups. This is the reason why paritioners and installers recommend you backup your data first: not because the program has a very high likelihood of eating your disk, but because you, as an operator, can only keep track of so much. O.
