I experienced it the hard way. This was plain stupid. I hadn’t updated my main box at home for a while. Since I was leaving for the city center this evening, thought of starting a lunar update so that it will be finished by the time I am back. Most important updates being the kernel bump and firefox of course. But I made a big mistake. I started the update, and just before I left, just thought of cleaning my living room a little. Took out my vacuum cleaner, and plugged it in. Switched it on, bang, fuse went out. That effectively shutdown my main box as well.
Rectified the short circuit, and checked my machine to probably restart the update. fsck failed! Tried a lot of things, still wouldn’t boot. Put my lunar installation cd in, and entered recovery mode and had to copy some files to override the screwups caused by the faulty updates, and upon the next boot, the machine was ok. But the whole process took me more than an hour. I started the update again, and now I am sitting in a cafe and posting this.
I have learnt my lesson though. I will be very careful with using my vacuum cleaner, whenever my machines are updating!
Reflections on the Strange and the Not so Strange 