Back in the days when there were bad proprietary IDE controller chipsets that enumerated differently under Linux than they did windows...

Well, as a kid I clobbered my windows install while trying to destructively check the validity of a disk. Checks to see if a filesystem is mounted won't protect you if it isn't.

Since then I've been -extremely- careful for any destructive operation on block devices, and generally careful otherwise.

Also, I don't know if blkid existed at the time, but it's /very/ useful in avoiding those types of mistakes.

I'm curious to see what your tcl code looks like. Did you keep it around for future disasters or was it just a quick and dirty one-off?

It was as quick and dirty as could be. It was pretty simple, really, as it just accepted a connection and wrote a file with no encoding. No security or concurrency or any other niceties.

Ah, got it. Sounds like it did the trick though, a clever idea to come up with in the midst of looming disaster! :-)