If Gentoo Linux were a Car...

1. You go pick up an engine (in pieces) and body parts from the central warehouse.
2. You find that your version of sys-car/transmission is too new and you need to get a newer version of sys-car/engine out of storage.
3. You put together the engine, transmission, and body. You're pretty psyched, only to find that you have yet to install car-misc/seats.
4. You install the seats, but find that the latest version of car-misc/seats does not correctly recognize the human body, due to an incompatibility.
5. You downgrade car-misc/seats and in the process must downgrade sys-apps/steering-wheel for height concerns.
6. You install the radio separately, which is the easiest part.
7. You turn the car on and it explodes.

Total: ∞ packages (0 good luck, 1 mistake)

I'd just like to put this out there for everybody...

1. Make frequent backups. Maybe every month.
2. Do not, under ANY circumstances, accidentally try to install Haiku to /dev/sda. Ever.

Now that the advice is out of the way, it's story time!

Yesterday, I was trying to install Haiku to my 512MB flash drive, which, when I plugged it in, got assigned /dev/sdb. The Haiku build system was, at the time set to write to /dev/sda2 (my 3GiB Haiku partition). I deleted the "2" and went on with my business. I ran jam -q haiku-image to build it.
"Hmm, this is taking a while."
"dd, wrote 134 MB to /dev/sda"
"/dev/sda?! WHAT?!"
"OH MY GOD!"

It wrote 134 MB of 0x00s to the beginning of my hard drive, clobbering the bootloader, partition table, and the root filesystem of my Linux installation (/dev/sda1).

It also got to the "Populating Image" step, so it was happily chugging along writing a Be File System over my entire hard drive and filling it with Haiku data.
^C!

Programs still ran, not all the files on / were lost, and I was in a state of panic.
One reboot later confirmed the obvious - no more system. Also, no more files in /. The filesystem layout was in memory, and I should have taken the time to recover some of the data before I reformatted.

fsck told me that /usr was trashed.. /usr is like "Program Files" and more for Linux... Random data written in random places on a volume is... bad ;)
/ was definitely a goner...
/home somehow survived, guaranteeing that my 8 years-worth of data would stick around for a while longer!
Fortunately, I had backups from August 15th!
Unfortunately, they were from August 15th. That means 3 months worth of upgrades to do...

Restored / and /usr, some of /var (installed package database only), and went to work upgrading.

500 compiled and installed packages later (the last of which are still going) and Jesus is... Well, for the situation, I have to say he's done pretty darn well. Kudos, me.

Once this is all done?

BACKUP TIME!

I think I need a NOS.

Prayer to install Linux

Leon wanted to bless his system before he installed Linux, and I came forth with the following:

Blessed be this computer system. Remove from it under the name of the system lord Linux all sins of the hard drive and RAM. Cleansed be its bits and its bytes. Praise be the system lord Linux.

- Dustin L. Howett

It releases the system from the grips of the demons of Windows, and thus asks for it to be forgiven of its Windowsy transgressions. :)