Last week, the automatic update system informed me of the availability of a new kernel (kernel 2.6.27.9-159.fc10) and I dutifully installed the upgrades. The machine stopped booting up since then! It would directly go to the GRUB prompt and nothing else would occur.
I thought I will just boot up using a CD, mount my drive and edit grub.conf to start using the machine again. I did so and thankfully the Linux partition started booting up again normally. But in this process my Windows Vista partition got totally messed up (again due to the grub manipulations I would think) and goes into a recovery and rescue mode on every bootup :(. Attempts to mount the partition from within Linux also comes out with an error!
Now darned if I had taken a backup ever! To summarize, I have lost my windows partition along with all the data on it and am now in the process of a re-install of WinVista. That this laptop is where I do my work on is what makes matters worse.
Lesson learnt - do not upgrade to a bleeding edge technology unless it has settled down or you BLEED like me. Guess I should have gone to FC9 first...
