Most of the time these days I stay on the Linux partition of my laptop, so I rarely see when there are system-wide updates that arrive through the manufacturer’s installer on Windows. I saw a BIOS update, and I decided to have a little fun and install it despite the fact that the updaters are Windows-centric and tend to break Linux bootloaders. To be fair I knew I probably shouldn’t have updated at all if I wasn’t experiencing a problem that the update would fix, but I can’t help installing updated software and getting fixes as a general practice.

A key thing in any disk endeavor is to document what you’ve done so you can replicate it. I forgot to write down what I needed to do for my dual-boot Windows and Linux laptop when I updated the BIOS the last time, but I thought I’d remember that I’d used a utility to repair and had to re-sign some binaries (I think. Or maybe that was what I had to do when I updated the kernel.) Since I hadn’t written enough down, I would end up spending a few hours repairing what a few extra minutes of documentation would have prevented. C’est la vie.

Clearly, I forgot something–I think I overwrote my rescue USB key that I used previously, again without writing down specifically what it was. I found one that worked, but most of the documentation around Secure Boot and GRUB fixes didn’t also involve how to include LVM. I ended up not figuring it out but rather had to restore from a too-old system backup. It worked, but software is really unhappy when the a half-year-old configs are mismatched with recent binaries. On the plus side, it was just software and my data was safe in the several locations I’d saved it to. I can handle inconvenience, but irretrievable data loss would be an entirely different kettle of fish.

At the end of the day, I sometimes embark on these little adventures knowing they’re ill-advised. I like a challenge though, and I learn quite a bit about how my system works when getting it back up and running.