This will sound like a tall tale, but it’s true: Today, I lost power completely while I was upgrading my kernel.

My laptop battery just doesn’t work, which is only understandable, considering the computer dates back to July 1999. When this computer was released, Age of Empires II was still in preordering.

Sure enough, I kicked the plug as the upgrade was churning away. Power dropped immediately, and I wondered if the kernel upgrade had finished in time.

It hadn’t. Things were very weird after that. The boot process went straight to a kernel panic on the first try, and the fallback boot option failed at every module insertion. It was a mess.

Of course, I could’ve taken the time to fix it, but to be honest, it’s too easy for me to reinstall with Arch. So I blanked the MBR and the first few sectors of the drive, repartitioned and 20 minutes later I was downloading xorg again.

I don’t keep anything on this computer, so there wasn’t anything to be lost, except perhaps an odd wallpaper file or two.

I feel guilty about not trying harder to fix it, but what can I say? This is my disposable machine. It was meant to be broken.