Computer rant

[ayu]

So I thought I'd write a little rant here about my recent happenings.

A few weeks ago one of my hard drives failed.
No biggie since I had a backup, but I wasn't sure if there was something on the drive that maybe I forgot to make a backup of.
So I've been trying for a while to save as much data as possible.

Now, yesterday my work laptop just decided that "fuck this I don't want to work any more".
I decided to install Windows 10 instead of Linux on my work laptop as a test, but also since I write a lot of report using Office in Windows anyway.
The installation didn't want to work from the USB so after several hours of messing around I just moved the whole damn installation folder to the C:/ drive of the laptop and installed from there.
Went pretty well with minor problem.

I of course needed to access all the work data now on the 1 TB drive that I have in the laptop for storage.
The drive is encrypted which made it slightly more difficult but not more problem than adding some extra time to the process.
I mounted the drive in Windows with Truecrypt and opened it.
But wait .. shit ... it's an ext4 partition .. didn't think about that.

Oh well, surely there are tools to read ext4.
I found a tool and tried, but it couldn't read the data.
Oh well, surely there are OTHER tools that can read ext4 in Windows.
Tried a few more, no success ... one tool could "read", but the data always came back corrupt.

Getting increasingly worried as I had to turn in a report today after lunch, I booted up a Linux Live USB on the laptop to try to retrieve the data.
The USB booted but the live installation crashed.
GOD F*CKING DAMN IT.
Well, I'll just make a new USB-stick then <-- loop 5 times, all failed.

So ... Linux Live wont work then I guess.
Let's try a few tools again.
The data came back seemingly okay but refused to boot in virtualbox (most of my data resides in virtual machines, making this even more of a head ache).

So, I'm back to square one.
After googling around for a while I found a short description in a blog post that said how to mount a vdi file with qemu.
So after struggling with another Linux Live distro (tried mint this time) I finally managed to get a working USB installation using my wifes laptop (I found that unetbootin works better on Windows for some reason).
I started Linux Live and set up qemu.

To my surprise it worked!
So right now I'm transferring all the data to an external hdd.
The only problem is that it's going snail speed and will take all night to finish.
Thus finishing the report will be difficult.
The customer has been contacted and has accepted my apology.

At long last I can sit back and breath for a moment before .... but wait ... my phone rings.
It's a guy from work.
"You know you are not allowed to use Windows 10 on your work laptop, right? It's a company policy. You have to remove it".


So ... I have to remake everything from the start .. AFTER the snail speed backup is finished.

fsgodrkgopdkhohkgdohkogdkh


</rant>

[bad_brain]

but I wasn't sure if there was something on the drive that maybe I forgot to make a backup of.

in the end there will be nothing halfway important on that drive that haven't been backed up already anyway...just to annoy you even more...believe me...

the "most likely to cause annoyance" parts of computers still are the hard drives, a few months ago the RAID on a customer server died, first one drive jumped out then the 2nd drive threw errors when rebooting....and when trying to pack it all into one file so I can move it to another server the expected finish time was some years in the future because of the ridiculously slow writes on the damaged drive. I have a dozen stories like those and ALWAYS it's a damn hard drive causing problems....now guess why I store everything double backed up since a while (external HDD and RAID1 on home server), with the loads of data you have to deal with when running multiple servers backups become pricey...

oh, and here's a fun story that happened to me just yesterday:
as you know I moved into that new apartment, right? so, good ol' postman delivered some shiny lamps I ordered at amazon, and in order to connect them I had to turn off power in that room. of course I was super lazy and instead of shutting my main system down properly I simple hit the fuse switch.
when done and power was restored I tried to turn the system on again, hit the power button, and: nothing. I mean: absolutely nothing. the home server next to it started fine.
so I tried to check if the PSU fuse is blown (not that there was a reason it would, but you have to start somewhere)...there is none, at least none I was able to access without ripping the whole thing out of the case (which would have been a total pain in the rear because of my obsessive cable routing).
so I connected the PSU with the power cord of the home server (not that it made ANY sense) and the system started. connected the PSU with the original cord again: system started. I mean....WTF? spent half an hour with swearing and mentally preparing for a blown PSU or even mainboard, just because some ghost lives inside my system which decides to piss me off? because that is the only explanation I have...

[ayu]

[
so I connected the PSU with the power cord of the home server (not that it made ANY sense) and the system started. connected the PSU with the original cord again: system started. I mean....WTF? spent half an hour with swearing and mentally preparing for a blown PSU or even mainboard, just because some ghost lives inside my system which decides to piss me off? because that is the only explanation I have...

wth xD ...

The world of computers never cease to surprise.

Anyway, it's 06:46 here now and the reinstall is just about finished .
Worked until midnight and got about 5 hours of sleep before I went up again to continue.
Need to set everything up now as well before I go to the office (have a report to deliver as soon as I can this morning).

[maboroshi]

I usually don't store data, which is pretty strange, well not enough data that would cause an entire evening to restore.

I have source code, a couple of documents I have written on esoteric philosophies and passwords. All the other stuff is pretty irrelevant for myself.

It's nice to have back ups though, I love you bad_brain *bows

[bad_brain]

It's nice to have back ups though, I love you bad_brain *bows

Dear Sir, thank you for the kind review, I am very happy you are satisfied with my file storage services.
1 buck for every time mab asked me "um, do you still have that file, I accidentally deleted it" and I would be Bill Gates rich.


@cats
assuming you have used it on other systems already for a longer time: what's your judgement of Win 10 so far?

[ayu]

@cats
assuming you have used it on other systems already for a longer time: what's your judgement of Win 10 so far?

Only tried it a little bit so far.
Not taking the problems into account with me using a test version and my laptop being an asshole.
I like it. They have a "settings" and a "control panel" now which was a bit confusing, but I guess they will sort that out before release (?).
It has a very smooth and nice feel to it, the UI is pretty sexy and the sound is comfortable.
I had some issues installing my stuff as there's not support yet, but that's to be expected.
Win 10 doesn't come with IE which is nice, and instead they ship it with their new browser.

I installed Windows 7 today on my work laptop only to discover that this version has no bitlocker support.
So I have to reinstall AGAIN tonight xD ...