Seeing as it has been a few months since I tried out a new distro, I got a wild hair today and decided to give PCLinuxOS (Gnome version) a shot.  The way that I keep my drives partitioned - specifically keeping my /home directory as a separate partition- swapping distros is usually a pretty painless endeavor and I can be back up and running within an our or so, with all my old apps in place and with all my preferences still in tact.

As I booted to the PCLinux Live CD, everything seemed to be business as usual.  The only notable point was that I thought that PCLinux has a nice default theme and icon set in the Gnome version of the distro.

So without too much hesitation, I went ahead and began the install process.  After choosing the appropriate keyboard and timezone settings, I was presented with the choice of how I would like my partitions setup, which by default uses the entire physical disk.  By selecting the "do it yourself" mode, I expected to be able to choose my smaller /dev/sda2 partition as my / mount point, format it for the OS, and leave my /dev/sda3 alone mounting it has /home. 

I entered what appeared to be a nice little partition configuration tool (Disk Drake I think?), which appeared to be exactly what I was needed.  I then selected the /dev/sda2 partition as the place I wanted my / mount point, and chose /dev/sda3 as my /home mount point.  When I chose the option to format my / mount point, I got a an error message that said that the partion could not be formatted.  Considering that my plan was to wipe it out anyway, I went ahead and removed that partition, and re-added it using that utility.   As I tried to move forward, I got a message that indicated that I needed to reboot, restart the installation process, then choose "Use existing partitions".  Simple enough right?  

I then rebooted to the live CD and entered the installation again.  This time I was presented with a new option.  "Choose the partitions you would like to format" and it only listed my larger /dev/sda3 partition with a checkbox next to it, with no mention of my /dev/sda2.  I found this a bit interesting, and after carefully removing the checkbox I moved forward. As I entered the next step I went to a screen "Copying files...".... wait... huh?  To where? 

Apparently it now considered my /dev/sda3  (which I intended to be /home) as the only drive.  I cancelled the process and opened the terminal.  After browsing to that directory, I found new /usr and /boot directories in that directory, which confirmed my suspicions. 

Things then began moving downhill and picking up speed....

I opened the partitioning tool GParted and was suprised to see that not only did my 15GB /dev/sda2 not exist anymore but that /dev/sda3 was now a 145GB partion of unallocated space.   NOT GOOD, considering that about 110GB of it is *very* allocated with data that I didn't intend on losing.

Even with all the steps I have taken since, I have been unable to mount /dev/sda2.  I even popped in Damn Small Linux to attempt some quick surgery and even it was unable to save me.   I then tried an Ubuntu live CD and it didn't recogize anything on /dev/sda at all.  At some point during this process I noticed that I was getting "bad magic number" and "corrupted superblock" type messages in relation to that device.

After putting the PCLinuxOS live CD back in, I was a bit relieved to see that it auto-mounted /dev/sda3 as /media/disk, and that I could at least access the files that were once safe and sound in my /home directory. 

So.... here I sit waiting for GBs upon GBs of data to upload via FTP to various servers so that I can wipe the enter friggin thing out and start over.  Tomorrow I get the fun of retrieving it all and piecing my laptop world back together....   <sigh/>

More to come....