Sometime in the early-to-middle part of governor's school this year, Songela was having some trouble with some command she was trying to run to get Rails up and working properly. She asked me if I could help, so of course I said I'd try, and at about 11:15PM or so, we sat down together to try to figure out what was wrong.
The details are a little bit fuzzy now, but I remember the first issue seemed to be that some gem wouldn't install due to a permissions error. So I tried running it with sudo, and I believe that also didn't work. Some directory still wouldn't allow permission! So I ran a change owner operation on that folder as sudo to make the owner be Songela's user, and we tried it again. Hm.... still looked like there was an error... Somewhere around this time, I took a look at the code and noticed that, from what I could figure out, she had a typo somewhere, and that typo could have solved everything, I'm pretty sure.
Anyway, feeling like I had screwed something up in her session, I suggested that she restart her computer. So she restarted it, but when we did, we just got an error message warning us that some monitor configuration file couldn't be loaded, and the screen would display nothing other than that. We tried restarting once or twice more before conceding that restarts would not solve this issue. So we started Googling.
It looked like basically whatever folder I had changed the ownership of was a very important system folder and needed to be owned by the root user. Um, oops. Also, we had both forgotten which folder it was. Um, oops. And the error reports that were similar to this around the internet weren't helpful in figuring out exactly which subset of folders I had screwed up. But the general idea seemed to be that we needed to start up a root terminal and change the permissions back to how they should be.
So we spent a while doing that. It was getting close to midnight now, which is when she would have to go back to her side of the dorm. The good news was that even if I couldn't fix it, she still had a Windows partition on here, so the computer was still perfectly usable.
After a little while of poking around in the root terminal, it seemed like nothing was going to fix this issue. Songela assured me that she didn't have any important data saved on her Ubuntu partition, and therefore it'd be fine if we just got rid of it. So I said alright, sure, we can do that and just re-install it from a flash drive that someone has sitting around or whatever. We got onto her Windows partition, got a disk formatting tool, cleared the Ubuntu partition, and rebooted.
And that's when things went very wrong. The boot file belonged to the Ubuntu partition. So when we started up her computer, it just sat there at a black screen with a single blinking cursor in the top left. No operating system would boot -- not Windows, not the USB stick that we plugged in, not the BIOS, nothing.
This was now about 12:15AM. Songela was sitting in the girls' side of the dorm while I was sitting in the lounge area since I, as a male TA, wasn't allowed into the girls' side whenever there was reasonable belief any student might be on that side.
And I'd just like to point out that in the span of about one hour, I'd taken Songela's fully working computer from having a typo to being totally bricked.
That is why Songela should have hated me.
Anyway, I was feeling extremely anxious at this point. Songela had trusted me to help her with her problem and I'd totally ruined her device. Oh my god, seriously, I felt terrible. She did live nearby, and her mom could have dropped off a Windows CD within the next couple days or something, but I wanted to fix this now.
After some more Googling, I found out how to get into the BIOS. I switched the boot order to USB first, but still, the USB wouldn't boot. I was just about to give up and send her to bed when I said, hey, hang on a sec, let me try one last thing, just in case. For no good reason, I plugged the USB into another outlet, restarted... voila. Oh my god. It worked.
As soon as that Ubuntu screen came up, I immediately felt relieved. Songela and I made sure that we were installing on the right hard drive partition together, but after that, I basically told her to go to sleep and that I would get Ubuntu back on her computer with Rails and other development tools ready to go by the morning. I think she went to bed sometime between 12:30 and 12:45 in the morning. I think I went to bed sometime around 2:15 or 2:30.
I still don't know why she ever asked me for help with anything after that >.<
Peace out.
