Looks like my laptop doesn't really want to keep its data in stable form. Like [I have blogged previously]({{ site.url }}/2007/05/31/borked/), the bus-reset issue apparently trashed my root partition again. I do not know the cause as it seemed a normal shutdown... but the moment I rebooted I had lost a lot of files (thankfully not on /home: I'm glad I keep data separated from the rest).

Reinstalling proved less difficult, thanks to a Kubuntu DVD I burnt with my other computer. However, I still had to tinker manually because of read errors (notice that this seems to be an issue with my DVD-ROM, rather than with the DVD itself). When those were unrecoverable, I manually changed the temporary sources.list to point to Internet mirrors and all was well.

I still don't know what causes such problems. I considered trying Gutsy Gibbon due to a new kernel, but being in alpha stage means it may get much worse bugs. I'm tempted to file a bug, but since there are a few othrs with similar issues, I have to check them first.

What's sure is that I'll be using partimage to make images of my drive. It'll be much easier to restore the configuration like that.