Probably the thing I remember most clearly was a little screwup with moving files on the first unix box I ever administered. Fixing it turned out to be a big deal that I now remember as "the mating of the dinosaurs". There's a very brief reference to it here:
"Within a week I'd figured out how to boot it single-user and normally, how to get around in SunOS and the boot monitor, how to make it unbootable by moving /sbin to a different partition, how to restore it by lugging the disk over to a friend's place and connecting it to his Sun 3/260 one night."
I think we were concerned about how little space there was in the root partition and wanted to try moving something to another partition. Not exactly familiar with the boot process, and how the OS would be needing to load a few important files like /sbin/init before it could even get to the point where it could mount other partitions... I probably moved /sbin and left a symlink. Geez.
So, the external disk was this 80-pound VME chassis, an SMD disk I think? It showed up as xy-something under SunOS. Anyway, it took some doing to find someone with compatible hardware, muscle the disk across campus, and then devise and execute a recovery plan in a living room full of loud people. Mounting my disk's partitions on temporary mount points on someone else's server, booted from their internal disk, so I could move the files back. Seems simple enough now!
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"Within a week I'd figured out how to boot it single-user and normally, how to get around in SunOS and the boot monitor, how to make it unbootable by moving /sbin to a different partition, how to restore it by lugging the disk over to a friend's place and connecting it to his Sun 3/260 one night."
I think we were concerned about how little space there was in the root partition and wanted to try moving something to another partition. Not exactly familiar with the boot process, and how the OS would be needing to load a few important files like /sbin/init before it could even get to the point where it could mount other partitions... I probably moved /sbin and left a symlink. Geez.
So, the external disk was this 80-pound VME chassis, an SMD disk I think? It showed up as xy-something under SunOS. Anyway, it took some doing to find someone with compatible hardware, muscle the disk across campus, and then devise and execute a recovery plan in a living room full of loud people. Mounting my disk's partitions on temporary mount points on someone else's server, booted from their internal disk, so I could move the files back. Seems simple enough now!