When I shut down my computer on Sunday, I was surprised by an error message reporting a write error on my hard drive. Well, nothing too serious, I thought.
My computer did not agree the next day, though. Right on cue for the public holiday, it would no longer boot.
So it was time to reinstall Ubuntu after almost a year of use.
First I backed up the data from my home directory and my wife's.
My external USB drive was the easiest way to do this, and I took the opportunity to reformat it from NTFS to EXT3. Thanks to the Ubuntu live CD, everything went very smoothly. Then I clicked the installation button and installed Ubuntu. My old Windows XP installation, which was still installed alongside it, was also replaced (intentionally).
There were few problems. I also trimmed down my home directory a little. Most programs, such as Eclipse, worked correctly again straight away, since Linux can do without a registry like the one in Windows.
I did not lose any data, as I used to in the old Windows days. Above all, it is important to have a working backup in case hardware really does fail. I use SBackup together with my USB drive.