What to do when you lose all your data

So, I've finally decided to ditch my NTFS partition -- wipe it, put in an EXT3, move my old data to the new EXT3, remove the old data, then expand the new EXT3 to take up the entire darn drive. The whole thing went pretty smoothly, until upon creating the new "mega" (1.2T) drive, it... couldn't find the file system. Mounting didn't work, file system check no go. PANIC!

So, what to do? All 400G of my movies, games, books, homework, programs, life's worth of stuff is gone! Funny thing is.. we didn't touch that ext3 file system, we simply messed with the partition tables. So we started thinking -- whats wrong. After fiddling with the partition table and holding our breath (many deaths may have occured had the data not been found) we found the problem. Apparently file systems do not like taking up an entire drive. If they do so strange things happen. So, you set the last cylendar to MAX-1. And all is happy again. Simply a lesson to the wise.

Also, adam appears to be messing with youtube. I suggest you check it out, and laugh as i laughed.

Also -- Andrew Mao has this little handmade gokart. He and I worked on it for a couple hours tonight, then decided to testdrive it in the rain. Lead acid batteries... poor soldering job... rain... puddles.... lets think abou... nah. We went anyway, had a lot of fun. Got him a good flat tire in the process too. Felt like sharing, that was a worthwhile experience.