How many times have you done a clean reinstall?

[matbluvenger]

So this should be fun. I'm about to do a clean reinstall on Ubuntu 11.10 because I messed up pretty decently. And it got me thinking... how many times have other people done this? I'm talking about full versions on main boxes.

Let's find out what your "Reinstall Ratio" is.

(# of times clean reinstall) / (# of months with Ubuntu)

After tomorrow, mine will be:

5 / 0.5 = 10 (ouch)

[jpdeaton]

atleast 20

[HavarN]

In the beginning, I did some, maybe 2 or 3. After a while, I learned that everything can normally be fixed without a clean reinstall. So...

3 / 77 = 4 %

[Erik1984]

I count from my return to Ubuntu in December 2010:

14 months of Ubuntu, install moments: 10.10 -> 11.04 -> 11.04 -> 10.04 -> 11.10

5 / 14 = approx. 0.36 fresh installs per month

[sffvba[e0rt]

Too many times to count... plus distro hopping will always keep your ratio's high (if you like to install on the machine rather than use VM's)...


404

[makitso]

On my main system, about once a year, 9.04, 10.04, 11.04 etc.

[Bölvaður]

Many times on many computers.
If I'd have to limit myself to only my main computer when I do a clean install with Ubuntu (no other distro) it should be something like:
13 / 56 = 0.23

I have most often done a clean installs when installing new version. Think I did a reinstall few times when I was a beginner due to some strange configs I made or something... dont remember why I did reinstalls.

[yetiman64]

# of months (Nov 07 - Oct 11 = 4y. to date: +4 months) = 52 months

# of clean reinstalls (only bare metal, no VMs), a reasonable guess would be: 30 (over several machines and multi partition dual boot installs)

Ratio: 30/52 = 0.58

Mostly do clean reinstalls when messing with partitioning or set-up configuration changes and such.

because I messed up pretty decently

My worst ever need to reinstall came about by me forgetting to unmount a 32 bit chroot bind mounted, and using the dreaded rm command very recursively and forcibly on the 32bit chroot folder structure in terminal as root. My blood seemed to freeze for a split second before my fingers hit the ctrl + c keyboard combo, too late, my system fonts folder got nuked and turned my whole interface to blank rectangles. Reinstall time.

Why I say my blood seemed to freeze for a split second is because my home folder and about 4 very full media partitions were also bind mounted at the time. Luckily none of them were touched, but I was unsure if any of the 3 or 4 system bind mounted folders were also touched. Safer to do a reinstall

[philinux]

So this should be fun. I'm about to do a clean reinstall on Ubuntu 11.10 because I messed up pretty decently. And it got me thinking... how many times have other people done this? I'm talking about full versions on main boxes.

Let's find out what your "Reinstall Ratio" is.

(# of times clean reinstall) / (# of months with Ubuntu)

After tomorrow, mine will be:

5 / 0.5 = 10 (ouch)

Every 6 months new version on main drive. Then development release gets installed to drive 2.

[matbluvenger]

My worst ever need to reinstall came about by me forgetting to unmount a 32 bit chroot bind mounted, and using the dreaded rm command very recursively and forcibly on the 32bit chroot folder structure in terminal as root. My blood seemed to freeze for a split second before my fingers hit the ctrl + c keyboard combo, too late, my system fonts folder got nuked and turned my whole interface to blank rectangles. Reinstall time.

Why I say my blood seemed to freeze for a split second is because my home folder and about 4 very full media partitions were also bind mounted at the time. Luckily none of them were touched, but I was unsure if any of the 3 or 4 system bind mounted folders were also touched. Safer to do a reinstall

Wow... ouch. No I didn't do anything that bad. Just installed xubuntu-desktop, lubuntu-desktop, and kubuntu-desktop (not the desktop environments) over Ubuntu 11.10. Not a terrible fix but I think it's more worth it to start over clean.