This past Friday I decided to dual boot my laptop with gentoo. I had been running xubuntu and I wanted to move over to Gentoo eventually. After running gparted overnight to repartition my hard drive I started the Gentoo livecd.
The installer in Gentoo was quite easier than what I had read in the past. I believe the GTK installer is fairly new and not many people recommend using it, which I found out after the fact. Anyways, after I got done doing the configuration script I hit the install button. After a few seconds I see it trying to partition the hard drive, even though I did not change any of the partitioning schemes. This was the point that I saw the end all of errors, “Install Failed”.
The installer had failed partitioning the hard drive and corrupted all of the partition data. This means that the computer does not know how to read what partition is where on the hard drive. Thinking back there are ways to fix this, but I was not thinking that clearly at that moment so I acted hastfully and just restarted the Gentoo installer and let it take over the entire drive.
Moral of this horror story, back everything up! I back everything important up to two seperate places. One copy goes to my local file server and another copy to my remote server. This can be a pain if you forget to move a file to all locations, but you will always have a backup copy somewhere if your drive fails (or you screw it up yourself).
