I just discovered something I did so idiotic I need a stronger adjective that what is in my name.
For one of my installs, I accidentally overwrote my 1TB HDD. A few minutes ago I wanted to put back some files… and all I saw was a distro.
It confused me because I was not sure if I was on my solid state drive or the HDD.
So, those files are gone. A lot is gone. Nothing too precious, I think… It might be a tremendous fuck up.
See kids, this is why you back up. Off the computer. Oh well.
EDIT: Recovering files using Photorec. Everyone who recommended this to me is a hero. Also a hero is the person who recommended FTK, but I was too eager to use something now than to sign up to download. I still should though…
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.
The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.
Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.
I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
There is a way to recover it. You can use a root shell aka recovery shell (usually available through your GRUB menu) to change the permissions on your home directory. But just reinstalling was probably easier anyway.
All you really would’ve need to do is update the ownership via root user, which you can actually do from the installer. Kinda funny cause you already went through the process of mounting and running the installer, so you were already there.