Sometimes I just *hate* Linux

This afternoon when I was concentrating on python and django, my PC just crashed again with no warning, no crappy sound from hard drive whatsoever. So I cursed and pressed the reboot button.

Oops. It won't boot anymore.

mdadm failed? cannot mount root file system? what the...? I haven't backup my work for 3 days for Christ sake... It can't be true... DAMN!

Now the system dropped me to the rescue shell. That's just great. Let's start digging.

First things first. mdadm doesn't work, why? Ohhh... /dev/sda* all gone? It seems one of the latest updates I just installed broke my system. So much for a 'patch'. There must be something wrong in the new init scripts. Module sd_mod not loaded? If it's not loaded of course sda* won't be there. Ask Google and trace these scripts...

(1 hour later)

All right. So it seems like we got sort of a race condition here. Maybe sd_mod should be loaded before mdadm. But still 'modprobe sd_mod' will not give me sda*. Why? Is it normal or is there something wrong with udev, too? Maybe I should read about udev now. I have always wanted to figure it out anyway...

(2 hours passed)

No. This is taking too long. Just fix it and get back to your work man. I need to patch my initrd again to make it right. Great. I don't have any boot CD on hand and the only thing that boots now in this room is an old notebook. Now what?

Wait. What's that? /boot/initrd.img-2.6.18-4-686.bak??

Oh... Yeah, they do make a backup when they update initrd. What am I doing in the past 4 hours? Why didn't I think about this? Just change the grub setting to the old initrd you idiot!

All right. Boot... edit grub command... continue... it boots as usual. Took me 3 seconds. Great. I just proved my own stupidity again. Let's just start working. It's 4 hours wasted.

Huh? What's that little red cross? NO SOUND? Now how am I suppose to hear my beloved Internet radio? Must be something wrong with alsa... Hmm... amixer doesn't work. So what's next? Maybe I should look it up on Google... No man you have wasted too much time already.... Oh come on it's just a quick trace... It won't take too long I guess...