I would just like to praise the incredible resiliance of the Linux operating system.

I overwrote the first megabyte of my primary hard drive. That's the boot sector, the partition table, and a large chunk of the start of my root filesystem. I have now recovered to the point where I believe (believe, but have not tested) I can reboot the system and have it come up in one piece. I've recovered my partition layout and built a new table. I've fscked the root filesystem and restored the obvious damage. I was even able to backup /home to another drive, just in case the recovery hasn't been as successful as I thought.

Some might tell you that I should never have been given the power to do such immense damage by mistake. That it's the fault of the OS. Sure, it probably should have warned me that I was about to overwrite something important, but for seven years I have been taking advantage of the way Linux does what you tell it without question. For seven years I've marvelled in the power and flexibility that gives me.

Ask any Unix system administrator, and they'll tell you about the one time they stopped respecting the OS. Unix respects you, it trusts you, because the only way to gain trust and respect is to offer it yourself.

And tonight Linux showed me how much it deserved my respect. I damaged its root filesystem beyond recognition and it didn't crash. It still hasn't crashed. I looked in directories with corrupt descriptors, files that made absolutely no sense, and Linux didn't panic on me, it just reported what it could see to the best of its ability. “Mate, that file looks totally screwed. I'm going to remount the filesystem read-only until you tell me you've fixed it. OK?” It let me rebuild the partitions. It let me fsck the broken partition and rewrite the boot block.

Yes.