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I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.
In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.
My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.
We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.
Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.
One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).
Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.
He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.
I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja.
I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.
Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.
Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.
For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.
I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(
I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.
I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back.
I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.
After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together.
I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.
I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.
I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.
But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.
I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.
Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?
32 -
Year 2013
- Trying this thing called Bitcoin
- Setup wallet in spare USB drive
- Buy 0.5 BTC (couldn’t afford more)
- Forgot about it
Year 2016
- Remembered I had bought BTC
- Looking like crazy for my USB drive
- Found it!
- Insert it into PC
- only one file in it
- essay_blah_blah_<sisters name>.doc
- poof, gone for ever14 -
Story time:
I was once working on a project that dealt with incredibly sensitive financial data.
We needed a client’s database to do a migration.
They wouldn’t send it over the internet because it was too big and they didn’t think it would be secure.
They opt to send it in the post on an encrypted usb drive.
(Fair enough thinks I)
USB drive arrives.
Is indeed encrypted.
MFW there’s a post it note in the envelope with the password on.
MFW this is a billion dollar multinational petrochem company.
MFW this same company’s ‘sysadmin’ and ‘dba’ once complained because a SQL script I sent them didn’t work - they’d pasted it twice and couldn’t work this out from the fucking “table already created” error message management studio was throwing at them.3 -
So my USB DVD drive needs more power than a normal USB port can deliver.
Normal Person: I'll bring it back to the store and get a diffrent one.
Me:
9 -
6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.
4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.
7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.
7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.
7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.
7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.
7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.
7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood
7:41am - found it.
7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.
8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.
8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.
8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.
8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.
8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.
8:12am - got on devRant.4 -
And here comes the last part of my story so far.
After deploying the domain, configuring PCs, configuring the server, configuring the switch, installing software, checking that the correct settings have been applied, configuring MS Outlook (don't ask) and giving each and every user a d e t a i l e d tutorial on using the PC like a modern human and not as a Homo Erectus, I had to lock my door, put down my phone and disconnect the ship's announcement system's speaker in my room. The reasons?
- No one could use USB storage media, or any storage media. As per security policy I emailed and told them about.
- No one could use the ship's computers to connect to the internet. Again, as per policy.
- No one had any games on their Windows 10 Pro machines. As per policy.
- Everyone had to use a 10-character password, valid for 3 months, with certain restrictions. As per policy.
For reasons mentioned above, I had to (almost) blackmail the CO to draft an order enforcing those policies in writing (I know it's standard procedure for you, but for the military where I am it was a truly alien experience). Also, because I never trusted the users to actually backup their data locally, I had UrBackup clone their entire home folder, and a scheduled task execute a script storing them to the old online drive. Soon it became apparent why: (for every sysadmin this is routine, but this was my first experience)
- People kept deleting their files, whining to me to restore them
- People kept getting locked out because they kept entering their password WRONG for FIVE times IN a ROW because THEY had FORGOTTEN the CAPS lock KEY on. Had to enter three or four times during weekend for that.
- People kept whining about the no-USB policy, despite offering e-mail and shared folders.
The final straw was the updates. The CO insisted that I set the updates to manual because some PCs must not restart on their own. The problem is, some users barely ever checked. One particular user, when I asked him to check and do the updates, claimed he did that yesterday. Meanwhile, on the WSUS console: PC inactive for over 90 days.
I blocked the ship's phone when I got reassigned.
Phiew, finally I got all those off my chest! Thanks, guys. All of the rants so far remind me of one quote from Dave Barry:
7 -
Got my new workstation.
Isn't it a beauty?
Rocking a Pentium II 366 MHz processor.
6 GB HDD.
64 MB SDRAM.
1 minute of battery life.
Resolution up to SXGA (1280x1024)
Removable CD-Rom drive.
1 USB port (we like to use dongles, right?)
Also it has state of the art security:
- No webcam
- No Mic
- Removable WiFi
- I forgot the password
And best of all:
It as a nipple to play with!!
31 -
Finally!
I installed gitlab at our company. I ranted about not using any version control whatsoever in the past but now it happened!
My boss wanted to see a project I was working on for himself so I copied the project to a usb drive and gave it to him. I used git for the project locally and I told him to use this too if he changes anything. And that it would be a great idea to have this centralised on our server. He agreed and I told him he just had to give me the order to implement it. He was like "go ahead" and one hour later we had a gitlab up and running.
We will have some internal training to do and then we are in the 21st century!
I'm so happy right now.9 -
Me: Want to copy this file to another computer
Bluetooth: Use me!
Google Drive: I'm better!
USB: I can help
Network shared folder: I'm in position!
Me: Let me add it as an attachment to a new email and download it on the other computer ¯\_(ツ)_/¯6 -
Last year I got an Acer notebook from a guy that stated that "it isn't working". "Okay" I thought, let's boot it up.
> Screen turns on, no splash screen, no hard drive activity
> Well fuck
> Tries to enter BIOS, nothing
> Openes case to reset CMOS
> Nothing
> Okay I think I need to flash a new BIOS
> Acer support site
> "Download the exe to flash the BIOS"
> What
> Spend two hours researching
> Find out that you can flash via USB and by pressing a key combination
> Extract the BIOS binary from the exe file
> Flash it on the notebook
> Splash screen and working BIOS
> Yay!!!
> No bootable devices found
> Fuck
> Connects hdd with test bench
> Completely fucking dead
> WTF
> Order a new hard drive
> 3 days later
> Install hdd
> Install Windows
> Finally working
WTF did you do to this notebook to not only mechanically break your hdd but also fuck up the BIOS completely??!!13 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
Although this is gonna sound like bullshit, this happened to me for real. Since that moment I use even more backup services AND I regularly check EVERYTHING.
Had a backup of my important data (still used mainstream services back then) on:
- Hotmail email attachments
- Google Drive
(Both link to another email account).
- A few data backup services
- DVD
- USB
- External HDD.
I wanted to copy some backup data over again:
1. Walk to my staple of HDD's, tried to grab it, somehow missed and knocked the whole fucking pile over. HDD broken.
2. Well fuck, let's go put some of my clothes in the washing machine for clean clothes at study/monday. After this shit being in the washing machine for just a few minutes, I realized my backup USB stick was in one of my pockets, in the washing machine. FUCK. Couldn't stop it so I waited till the end, tried it and well, it wasn't working at all anymore.
Fuck my fucking life slightly right now.
3. *remembers about the backup disc*. I forgot to keep it in its case, very deep scratches and so on, unreadable. FUCKING FUCK.
4. Right, I still have those online services! *tries to login to all of them (including hotmail/gdrive) but forgot the password. Well, let's login to my backup account then (hadn't used that one in years). Account was suspended for some reason.
Started to get really anxious because every online backup service was linked to that email address.
Contacted customer support. They really couldn't restore it because of some issues they weren't allow to tell me. Sorry but I couldn't retain access.
5. Well this is fucked up. Couldn't get into any of the backup/hotmail/gdrive accounts anymore.
I tried contacting their support but never got any replies.
This was the moment I realized I fucked up big fucking time because damn, this stuff at this level hardly happens to anyone.
FUCK.37 -
(The exact opposite of a rant, yay)
My school gave everyone in my class (and the two other 10th-grade CS classes) these neat 64GB USB sticks.
They are our property (paid by our fee every student has to pay every year so the school can afford paper for the printers, school books, and other materials such as USB sticks for 10th graders), but we have to keep some files for a lesson on the root of the USB (currently ~900MB).
That's not an issue, personal files go in my _Personal folder anyway.
Of course, I wanted to VeraCrypt all my USB drives I use at school, but since I don't have admin rights at our school and they use Windows 10, I just used BitLocker. Good enough, the only thing I want to achieve with encryption is other students being unable to read data off a lost drive (such as my _Personal data)
Also this stick is hella fast even with BitLocker enabled, 200 MB/s (minus 13 MB/s with enabled BitLocker) sequential r/w speed according to CrystalDiskMark.
33 -
Crap.. got myself into a fight with someone in a bar.
Hospitalized, turns out that my knee is bruised and my nose is broken. For some reason the knee hurts much more than the nose though.. very weird.
Just noticed that some fucker there stole my keychain USB stick too. Couldn't care less about the USB stick itself, got tons of those at home and hard drive storage even more so (10TB) but the data on it was invaluable. It held on a LUKS-encrypted partition, my GPG keys, revocation certificates, server backups and everything. My entire digital identity pretty much.
I'm afraid that the thief might try to crack it. On the flip side, if it's just a common Windows user, plugging it in will prompt him to format it.. hopefully he'll do that.
What do you think.. take a leap with fate and see how strong LUKS really is or revoke all my keys and assume my servers' filesystems to be in the hands of some random person that I don't know?
Seriously though.. stealing a fucking flash drive, of what size.. 32GB? What the fuck is wrong with people?33 -
I ALWAYS, *ALWAYS* do a triple check before I format a drive/USB flash drive/anything.
Sometimes I think its stupid but hey, you could never know!
Just wanted to format a USB flash drive so I formatted it with gparted, didn't go well so I took it out, back in and was about to try again when... last check....
Oh, that not the flash drive, that's my main SSD 😅
CTRL+R in gparted aaaaaand my flash drive is there again, formatted, done.
Thank you, self taught triple check 😅6 -
So I had to chroot into my system (I fucked up). Plugged in my backup arch live USB and then suddenly... What the actual fuck? I guess somebody borrowed my drive and used it for barbaric purposes
13 -
A quite normal Windows day:
Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"
Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."
"I've got something weird on screen."
Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."
Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."
Windows: "Well, well."
Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"
Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"
Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"
Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."
Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."
Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"
Graphics card: "Well, not at first."
CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."
Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"
Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."
Windows: "That's nice to hear."
USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."
Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"
USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."
"You're not on my list." - "Say something."
Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."
Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."
Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."
Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."
Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."
Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"
Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."
Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"
Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."
Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."
Excuse me for stealing your time
And I know it's way too long7 -
I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.
So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.
My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.
It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....
Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.
My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.
My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.
Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.
My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.
And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.
And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.
It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.
I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.
Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.31 -
What I did wrong during my home office cleaning session this morning:
- put soap on my mouse mat
- snapped my enter key
- vacuumed up my F8 key
- absent-mindedly cut my ethernet cable
- lost my zero key
- dropped my backup hard drive (data was recoverable, but I need a new drive)
- lost one of the nose pads on my glasses
- got a cocktail stick stuck in a USB port
- exploded my mouse by using the wrong type of battery
Things I did good:
- nothing11 -
It's a Sunday, playing around with code/servers/config stuffs and decided to give Arch another try! Downloaded Apricity OS (Yes, I still love beautiful interfaces I don't have to fully configure), realized I didn't have any spare discs so went looking for a USB flash drive.
Seriously. Those FUCKERS are always around when you don't need them.
But ohhhhh, the FUCKING SECOND YOU NEED THEM, THEY ARE NO-FUCKING-WHERE TO BE MOTHERFUCKING FOUND.
Well, there goes my FUCKING plans for today.14 -
So I found a HDD in a trash bin, plugged it to a USB, and I found this while browsing shit
Either its previous owner is hiding something or is just a lonely man and promptly forgot where his ahem... interesting stuff was stored.
I only backuped what I need and erased the damn thing btw, its now a spare drive
16 -
Downloaded Kubuntu because i couldn't seen to be able to boot from a freshly created KDE Neon bootable usb.
Installed it onto my netbook (Lenovo Thinkpad X121E) and it worked great!
But just the fact that somehow the installer froze when trying to setup hdd encryption kept bugging me.
Took a random flash drive which was laying around and put it in to see what would happen. KDE Neon booted just like this and everything worked very well with hdd encryption.
I now have a very secure netbook 😊15 -
A friend bought a new PC and asked me to help him set it up. He said he got everything working except the CD drive. He said it took him forever just to figure out how to get the keyboard and mouse to work. "I mean, have you ever owned a computer where the keyboard and mouse had to plug into the monitor instead of the computer?"
He bought a desktop PC, and and all-in-one thinking it was a monitor. He had the HDMI going from the all-in-one to the desktop, and was trying to use the CD drive on the desktop.
Wish you could've seen his face when I unplugged the desktop computer and his "monitor" didn't shut off. He looked at the desktop, and then the all-in-one, and said, "Wait... How is it still on?"
He also had his old USB wifi plugged into the desktop thinking that's what was providing him with an internet connection.11 -
Yet another rant about crappy electronic designs.
Just now I was cleaning my desk and stumbled upon some old hard drive in a caddy that I still had laying around.. I figured, let's plug it in and see whether the drive still works. And to some extent, it does! Except that every few minutes it craps out on me. And after disassembling the caddy, I think that I know why.
Just as background information, hard drives work at 12V and generally require about 10W to spin their motor. Meanwhile USB operates at 5V. So a boost converter needs to be present in the controller to step up the voltage and power the drive.
Now what's a boost converter? It's an inductor, a capacitor, a transistor and a diode in a specific arrangement (if you're interested in the design, check out https://youtube.com/watch/...), along with feedback circuitry to stabilize output voltage. Now that transistor is important.. it switches at very high frequency, and its rise and fall times create heat. In the particular transistor used in that controller, it apparently causes the transistor to operate at 65-68°C. That's quite toasty IMO, and overheating may be why the controller is so unstable. But the Chinese manufacturers thought that it's just fine and okay to be sold without heatsink or some research into transistors with better rise and fall times.
So the hard drive craps out on me and yet again it's because of certified shitdesigns. MOTHERFUCKTURERS!!!!27 -
The year is 2218. Machines have taken over the world. A small pocket of resistance fights back against them. And in their darkest hour, Windows, which hasn’t been updated in over a century, still won’t tell their strategists what program is keeping the USB drive with their plans open. They don’t want to unplug the drive as that could damage the files.
While they’re trying to figure it out, the attack comes and catches them all unaware.
As a result, humanity is extinguished.
Don’t let this happen to you.5 -
!code
I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.
I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.
I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.
Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.
After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.
So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.
what the crap? why?
So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.
Windows greets me.
Again.
What the hell?
At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.
But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.
If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.
Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/16 -
i am BEYOND pissed at google.
as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.
when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.
ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.
but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).
so now this screen pops up.
"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.
well, i'll create one. simple enough.
no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.
i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.
i truly hope someone got fired.
so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.
now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'
i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.
google is a fucker.
after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.
i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?
after i press enter, it started.
what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?
i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???
maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.
fuck you google.7 -
> An update is available
> Installs update
> Update failed bc of corrupted system components
> Random bluescreens
> Sfc /scannow
> Can't scan because there is one pending repair
> Restart
> Does everything except repairing
> Recovery mode
> System integrity check failed
> Reset Windows
> Reset failed bc of "some" problems
> Media creation tool for bootable USB
> Tool fails to write image
> Media creation tool on another pc
> Successful
> Install Windows
> Missing drivers, cannot install
> Wipes hard drive
Fuck you Microsoft5 -
Yes, that’s an M2 drive plugged in via usb 2.0. I dunno, maybe when you just need size over anything else maybe that’s ok but wasting all that work that ssd engineers put into making m2 drives so fast just feels stupid.
24 -
Was trying to be cool and wanted to delete all data on my USB stick using sudo rm - rf /*
Well, it deleted all data. But on my primary drive. So I ended up loosing all my work progress.5 -
So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.
But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.
It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!
Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.
Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.
That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!16 -
Spent 45 minutes burning a win10 dvd as all usb drives decided to die. Only to find out the intended laptop has no dvd drive.....6
-
Last week I was erasing a 2Gb USB thumb while copying some really important shit to my backup disk. I look at the terminal and see it's taking a lot of time to did zeroes on dev/sdb.
Then I realized that dev/sdb is the backups drive and I just erased the firsts sectors of my only fucking backup.
It's ok, I said, let's see what can TestDisk do for me. And it only could find an empty sad partition that had useless shit on it. Whdd couldn't even find the drive. Cat and dd vomited 160Gb of nothing to a file that couldn't be read. I was lost, because I failed doing something I'm really good at. And I did it because I was to stupid to check fstab...
It's the very first time I couldn't recover data, so I'm thinking about delete "Data recovery" from my resume skills and put "Data cleaning. Really effective. I can send you 160Gb of pure horse shit to prove it" instead.2 -
MAD scientist time! Can the USB type C port on Nvidia RTX tuning card used as a standard USB port? Eg charging your phone, or read USB flash drive🤔
35 -
Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!
So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.
And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.
And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.
Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!
Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!12 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".10 -
This is a follow-up of my last rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1323422/...
TLDR; My step-son tripped over my HDD power cord, sending it plummeting towards certain death.
So this is just over a year ago. At this point, my GF and I are married, and she's about 7 months pregnant with our daughter. Her son, Nicolas - the one from the last rant - is 13 years old.
So it was a Saturday, and I had Nicolas helping me to clean up the apartment. My wife was off the hook, because, ya know - she's pregnant.
While I was cleaning the living room, I had Nic cleaning the kitchen/dining room area. At this same time, I had my laptop and a 3Tb external USB hard drive on the dining room table, copying a bunch of data or something. This external HDD also had it's own power cord, which was plugged in next to the table.
Next thing I know, I hear an "Ohp!" followed by a crash. It was the horrifying sound of my hard drive plunging 36 inches off the table towards certain death. And death, it had.
Before even checking, I knew this HDD was dead. It took a lot for me not to snap at the kid. I told him to get out of the kitchen and go clean his room. That hard drive... hadn't been backed up. At all, which is on me. Even more so, since that data was really irreplaceable.
Even knowing that the HDD HAD to be dead, I still plugged it in, hoping for a miracle. I got nothing, it wouldn't even spin up.
$ dmesg -w
Showed that linux saw the USB controller and even the HDD controller (it printed out the manufacturer, SeaGate). The data was valuable enough that I was saving up some money to have the data recovered, which would be about $2,000.
However, before I had saved up enough money... My apartment was broken into and all my external HDD's (and some internal ones I had laying around) were stolen.6 -
I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.
So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.
I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...
~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.
~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!
~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.
~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.
~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.
~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.
~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.
And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...1 -
School's windows installations had the UAC set to lowest.
Anyone could install malware or fiddle with important settings.
Oh by the way, the same school who's gData found it funny to go through my USB drive and delete all executables and all my code because it was "possibly malicious".
Started installing random crap and messing with people in retaliation.
Was fun.
Until I got caught.
Good thing I compiled a list of security flaws earlier on.
From that day on, everytime I messed up, I sold them two security vulnerabilites to let me off the hook.
These included access to all kinds of drives in the windows network, accessing other PCs desktop, literally uninstalling random printers from the network etc..
Fun time.3 -
I used to use WinBtrfs on Windows to get away from the clusterfuck that is NTFS on my WD Elements. But today I figured.. why? Why not just mount the drives to my file server already? I mean even over a USB 2.0 link, a USB 3.0 drive will perform decently. Not as good as my RAID-0 array there for sure, but still. So, that's it.. fuck it. Done with trying to get WanBLowS to adapt to my needs. Decent drives for a decent operating system, all the 10TB straight to my file server!! Then WanBLowS can go jerk itself in its clusterfuck of NTFS and SMB shit, while the actual grunt work is done by something that's at least reliable and won't shit itself - Linux. As it should be done!!! Trying to get WanBLowS to manage something more important than browsing the Phasebuk, what was I even thinking?!13
-
Damnit! I dropped a 16GB USB Drive on an open floor, and the thing has just vanished. It has my install files for CentOS 7 on it. It's like a mouse or something came out and snatched it and, poof, gone. Dobby, damnit, what did you do with my USB Drive?4
-
Stolen’t.
A USB drive has 2 sides. So it’ll take a maximum of 2 tries to get it right.
Why does it take at least 5?1 -
About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.
So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.
Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.
5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.
Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol2 -
Shootout to my 2.5GB Maxtor hard drive, that I heavily used between 1997 and 2001. There were no USB drives, and CD burners were too expensive for consumers. So I used to open my PC case, remove the drive (along with Windows and my software), bring it around at my friend's house and have fun while copying hundreds of mp3s, patiently downloaded from filesharing and 56k modems or ripped from CD audio, in and out.
One time it fell out from my desk, hitting hard floor big time. I thought I lost it forever, and basically my whole PC in it. Then I tried plugging again its IDE and power connectors, and it was still working! ... well, half of it. That badass still continued to work with one of its two platters crashed, and got some more mp3s with it.
Maybe I still have it...1 -
Now I know why our Australian trained junior "Software Engineers" are so dumb. According to academics, "...students in postgraduate IT courses were unsure how to use a computer or a USB drive."
Source:
https://abc.net.au/news/2019-05-06/...10 -
Gotta love Linux!
Wanted to install Arch on my Rasperry PI yesterday, but don't have a cardreader on my PC. Still had an SD with a different distro (RasPlex) lying around. Popped that in, connected power and ethernet only, looked up the default SSH credentials and got to a blinking terminal on my desktop PC.
Well, how am I gonna format my microSD? Rasplex comes without fdisk, and I booted it from the only microSD slot.
Well, here we go - Extracted arch to a usb thumb drive, chrooted into it, switched microSD cards, partitioned and formatted it from the USB-Arch, installed Arch on it, chrooted from Arch to Arch (😁), set up drivers, network and ssh access, rebooted to my why-the-hell-not distro.
Everything worked!3 -
Ever encrypt files on a USB drive before?
Ever do that then forget the password you used for the encryption?
Yep... 😭11 -
Last week my university decided to give away old hardware to students (CPUs, displays, keyboard, mouse, speakers, printers etc.). My roommate got me this beast. I was so excited and decided to boot it up only see to GRUB error 22 :( I think the hard drives were wiped before handing it out.
I've never set up a server before and I've been trying to boot up an Ubuntu server via USB drive but it's not detecting the OS installation files. I've been searching all around to make this work but it's not fucking working. I don't have any other cables or CD drive to try something else. I want to make this work. I have exams next week and I can't stop thinking about this. Godammit
8 -
*packing for a school-hosted graduation celebration with friends*
let's see, first rule of packing for a trip, count on every slim chance happening...
List of things now in backpack:
3 changes of clothes (1-night trip for an all night party in <100-MILE-AWAY MAJOR CITY>)
Laptop
3DS
3x 4-port USB Hubs
10-port power strip (not fully in bag, but mostly so.)
Extra pair of shoes
3.5" external floppy drive
First aid kit
SAK
precision driver set
soldering set
multitool
pliers (1x farmer's, 1x bent needlenose)
multimeter
empty laptop HDD (250GB)
magnet in Altoids tin (can't have it trashing the HDD!)
VGA to RGB (Composite ends) adapter
Composite/S-VIDEO USB capture card
Portable USB chargers (1x 30k mAh 2-port, 1x superslim 3k mAh 1-port)
Enough phone chargers to replace all chargers within 30 miles
Smelling salts
2x 16GB thumbdrives
Boot disc set
$200
School IDs (for bag's ID slot)
3 pairs of decent earbuds (no el cheapo $1 ones because they break trying to get them out of the package)
Serial to USB adapter
Rehydration salts
Magnesium fire striker
Plenty of pens and pencils
Emergency radio locator beacon
Emergency cellular locator beacon
SD/eMMC/CF/TF/MCP(D) USB reader
external HDD reader (2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE/SATA, external power)
am i missing anything?11 -
I just saw an ad by a viral marketing agency thisventviral.net that sell a 16GB USB stick with an os image they call Xtra-PC for 29,60.
I immediately noticed that it seemes to be a simple USB boot stick with a Linux distro with a Windows like ui and OpenOffice and other software pre installed.
They guy took out his CD drive bay an claimed that he removed the hard disk. While odd his clames about faster speeds are obviously true because microshaft windows and office are bloated pieces of shit.
So this leaves me in the odd position that a viral marketing scam selling you over priced USB sticks and an image you probably could find for free, also makes people adopt Linux instead of the bloated shit. And that with people that won't notice any of the downsides of using Linux.
Wired position, should I hate them or should I commend them for theire unintended efforts spreading Linux desktops?5 -
took me 20min to realize why windows wasn't recognising my flash drive:
it wasn't the usb stick I plugged in but the mouse's dongle... stupid me😜 -
Just went to grab a USB stick from my pile of random sticks, to make a windows installation drive. Well lucky me, happened to grab one with an iso already on it1
-
Hey guys, wanna install Linux first time, but had some doubts.
Config - core 2 duo 2.93GHz, 2GB ddr2 ram, 320 hdd, AMD graphics card.
Doubts :
1. After writing it on usb and setting it in usb boot mode, the system didn't read the pen drive data ... is it because of the writing software ... I used power iso.
2. What about the partitions ? Do they still remain and will the install guide only ask to format the c drive or the whole hdd ?
3. Which distro do y recommend... I had kali/debian/fedora/mint in mind
My friends complained about fedora taking 45 seconds to boot up, I don't know about the other distro's ..
Thanks in advance10 -
Guess somebody has a bad day xD
Source: stupidedia.de
Transkript:
Linux is the biggest computer - virus that doesnt come from Redmond. Its especially handy if you want to create a 16Gb usb-drive out of a 160Gbdrive
3 -
This was about two years ago, and is so fucking simple. But it's because I fucked up something so goddamn simple that I'll never be able to forget.
One of the stupidest fucking things I've done?
Went into the GNOME Disks utility trying to wipe a SanDisk Cruzer USB drive. BAM! There goes the entirety of my /dev/sda disk! Oh, and you know all partitions on that disk?? Gone!! Nothing I could do.
I don't know which pisses me off about myself more: The fact that Linux has more complicated tools that do the same exact job but make me think about what the actual fuck I'm doing thus preventing fuckups, or the fact that I was too fucking lazy to use them and decided to go with the dirt simple option and still managed to fuck myself over in the end...
Lesson for you kids that haven't fucked yourselves over in a way this dumb yet: ALWAYS have that backup installer USB somewhere. ALWAYS. -
I remember the first time I was experimenting with Linux and decided to install Kali Linux (was still version 1 at the time) and in the process cleaned my hard drive. I was in first year and I hadn't been introduced to git, so you can imagine what happened to my code.
Or when I dumped all my databases into one SQL file (the feature looked tasty in phpmyadmin) and then after reinstalling everything, I couldn't import back the files.
Or last year, where I was on industrial attachment. So we were to delete some data from DHIS2 manually. So as a developer I grouped all organisation units to be deleted under one parent and wrote a python script to recursively delete anything in that group. Just when I was about to show my supervisor how efficiently my script was deleting stuff, he said, "Don't delete anything yet". I hope he doesn't read this *wink*
Fast forward, last week on Friday I dropped my external hard drive. It just works on one USB port now, no idea how and why. -
So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.
ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.
With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.
Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.
But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.
So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.
Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?
But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.
With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!
Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.
Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!
And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!10 -
...Aaaand it's built!
Couple problems though:
- The power supply has massive coil whine when the computer is shut down
- I can't seem to get a windows installation on my USB drive
11 -
I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.4
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Finally got a new laptop at work!
The first thing to do: install linux in it so the beast could roar free.
Download mint iso, dd it into an usb drive, boot it up in uefi mode, .... /dev/sda read error: -110. Fuck, must be smth w/ secure-boot. Disable it, rinse and repeat. Same error. Wtf, could my drive be broken?
dd iso into another usb drive, boot live env -- read error. THE FUCK! It's wildly unlikely my both usb drives died on the same fucking day!
Go to it admin to ask for an usb drive. Iso->usb, boot -- live env is up. My my, look who's unfortunate today :)
cryptsetup, install, reboot et voila, the beast is finally roaring!
6 -
macOS facts:
- Darwin core is open-source (https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu). Not the case with Windows.
- You can use macOS without using any Apple online service like Apple ID, FaceTime or iCloud. Terminal will still work without restrictions, and any app can be installed manually. It's totally different from Google services on Android, without which most of the apps won't work at all.
- macOS updates are trivially to disable. It's a matter of unchecking "Update this mac automatically" checkbox in software update settings. Not the case with Windows, Windows updates are universally hated among developers for intentionally complex UI and update services being very hard to disable.
- Almost every feature or default behavior you dislike can be trivially disabled with one console command. Features won't re-enable automatically like I heard update service does in Windows. The only feature I dislike that I wasn't able to disable was a notification about unsafely unplugging a USB flash drive.
- Out of the box, you get a sophisticated disk manager that allows all kinds of manipulation on drives, just like what you get in Ubuntu.
- Just like on smartphones, you can trivially restrict or provide access to certain features like camera, microphone, etc. on app to app basis. I don't know how to easily do it in Linux, let alone in Windows.
- Apart from mastodons like GIMP, I find open source apps for macOS to have better UI than their Linux alternatives.
- Objective-See offers useful FOSS apps for macOS, they help with privacy and malware detection: https://objective-see.com/products....
I don't want to start a fight. Please, abstain from commenting on one OS being better / worse than the other. Please, don't comment on Mac computers being better / worse than computers of some other vendor. I'm very confused now because of my Dunning-Krueger thing (read my previous rants), so I just want to present the facts about macOS that I think deserve more exposure.27 -
Dear laptop vendors, stop wasting so much precious device estate on nothing!
This wasted physical space could easily fit in six USB ports, or four USB ports and two HDMI ports, or four USB ports and one HDMI and one LAN. Or four USB ports and two SD card slots.
> "Who the heck needs 6 USB ports?"
You don't need more USB ports… until the day you do need them comes.
> "HDMI and LAN are feature creep!"
It's "feature creep", until you need it.
> "Ever heard of USB hubs?"
While better than nothing, they are tedious to carry around and can hardly support more than one external high-power device such as an external hard drive or blu-ray drive, except if you have an external power adapter, which is even more tedious to carry.
Also, have fun closing programs until the operating system stops whining "volume is busy" just so you can unmount your external SSD and then reconnect it through a USB hub. Sounds like fun, huh?
You were playing audio from your external SSD? Too bad. Now you need to close the media player to be able to unmount the SSD, then later restart it and seek the last position. And all of that could be avoided if your laptop happened to have one more USB port.
10 -
Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.
So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.
As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?
Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.
Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.
Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.
Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.
Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!
Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems
2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch
Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)
A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!
Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner
Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.9 -
What a fucking weekend. Tried to clone an existing windows hard drive onto a new unused one with the same size. Oh the adventure that I got myself into. 😭
Old hard drive corrupted in the middle of the process (how???). Not bootable anymore (until at the very end).
Then an odyssey started to try to rescue the old data using my spare linux drive onto a USB stick. Fucking with uefi settings and apparently a boot sequence with incorrectly named drives (?).
Had to reflash a usb stick I had for linux installation to windows installation.
I had multiple drives attached to my PC and didn't want my own ones to be overridden, so I needed to detach all drives except for the target one.
The target one had already fucked up partitions from the failed cloning, so I had to research the tools to fix it manually, not knowing what I was doing.
At the end it worked out, windows installed, data copied onto the target.
The old drive was able to recover, but I didn't give a shit about it anymore.
Was a sleepless night, spent wayy too much time with this...2 -
Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...
Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.
A bit later...
I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.
Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?
Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?
Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.
THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.
I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?
No.3 -
Every god damn time I have to interact with windows I hate it more and more. I sold my old Dell PC, and said I'd install Win10 on it for the dude.
It's now been 2 hours of me trying to figure out why the Win10 installer complains about missing drivers, and trying to figure out exactly what drivers are missing, because they sure as absolute fuck don't tell you.
"A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD, USB or Hard disk driver. If you have a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive with the driver on it, please insert it now."
Well how the fuck am I supposed to know what driver you need? The least helpful error message in the history of computing....11 -
As a kid, I wanted to try new stuff. New programs, new games, new websites, new OSs. Those were the days when we had very limited and slow access to internet and cloud was still to be discovered. I had everything on my local HDD.
So one fine day I decided to try out Ubuntu on my Windows 7 Laptop.
I emptied a partition, burnt the image to a USB drive and booted from it. Installation went well.
Somehow I ended up deleting the logical partitions on my Windows machine. Not only I was not able to boot into Windows, my HDD was just one tiny partition. I cried my eyes out. That disk had everything I ever had.
PS: I recovered everything by restoring the partitions.5 -
Kinda pissed. Ordered a WD red plus 8TB on November 20th from newegg along with some other stuff. He drive showed up DOA on the 26th, tested everything I could to make it work. But in the end I couldn't even get it to initialize.
Ok. No problem this happens. request a return and replacement.
Got that in today. Over 2 weeks later. Fucking EXACT same problem.
and just to make sure I'm not fucking crazy I grabbed a 1tb thats been sitting on my desk unused for years. Plugged that into my NAS. Works fucking perfectly. Even able to pull it and wipe it using my USB drive reader on my desk after. I can even fucking reinitilize it back and forth from mbr to gpt.
Not asking for replacement this time. Just refund. Gonna order directly from WD. If this one fucks up I'm switching to Seagate for a couple of years4 -
Today I created my first shell script for automation.
I have a git repository I use for backing up documents at the training centre I'm at for work. Not a specific project, just all of the documents and miscellaneous stuff. The need for this came about because they re-image the computers every month with a new version of windows (Because they're too cheap to register windows). And I can't risk forgetting to copy all the files onto my USB drive the day before they re-image.
So at the end of each day I open a git bash and type:
git add .
git commit -m "Backup - dd/mm/yy"
git push
Not a particularly laborious task but repetitive and time consuming.
So I decided to create a .sh script to automate the process
(The idea originally occurred because of this post: https://devrant.com/rants/329221/...)
So after about half an hour fiddling about with dates and $ signs, I came up with GitBackup.sh:
git add .
today=$(date '+%d-%m-%y')
commitMsg="Backup - "$today
git commit -m "$commitMsg"
git push origin master
Not much but proud to call it my first automation script.2 -
Translation:
"According to Xiaomi, the U-Disk (Xiaomi's new USB drive) has UDP technology that prevents damage by splashing and dust."
HOW A TRANSPORT PROTOCOL CAN'T PREVENT THAT?
What's next? "The new notebook has HTTP technology that makes it waterproof."
7 -
I had to send in my bachelor thesis project in paper documents and also digitally ... on a CD. Probably bought one of the last CD packs in my life. Why does uni need this in 2020? What about usb?
I don't even have a PC with a CD-drive anymore. Everything is downloaded. I was lucky that there is still a laptop at home that has a drive.
Am I spoiled? Why are CD's still needed, except for games (maybe?)?12 -
I am a college student that's pursuing a degree in Computer Science. Once one of my classmates said that she had a 3 GB pen drive. I was curious as I'd never heard of any company making pen drives in that capacity. I asked her to show it to me, she showed it to me and pointed out the words "USB 3.0".
The same woman once copied the icon of Turbo C++ for an assignment submission.2 -
Steps to make a portable version of Minecraft Java Edition (for Windows):
1. Get a flash drive, preferably of a decent size (>500MB). I used a 128GB flash USB 3.
2. Download Java JRE (version 8).
3. Download MultiMC
4. Install Java, put destination on flash drive. example: x:/mc/java
5. Eject flash drive.
6. Uninstall JRE from computer. This will remove the installation entry in the computer. Since flash drive is ejected it cannot delete off drive.
7. Install multimc. example: x:/mc/multimc
8. Point multimc to JRE location on flash drive.
9. Edit the path of the JRE to be something like this: ../java/etc... This keeps it from trying to use the drive letter and use a relative path instead. I edited the multimc config file to do this. Can probably be done in program too. If you modify config file you will have to quit multimc.
10. Login with your minecraft account in multimc.
11. Download some version of minecraft or modpack.
12. Enjoy on any windows computer and take with you!8 -
Weekly Rant-
My best office prank by far was at my high school. First, I bought a USB rubber ducky and programmed it to backdoor my friends school computer with netcat and a batch file that ran in the background so that I could connect to his computer any time inconspicuously. The next day, I injected his computer with the drive when he went to turn in some papers.
You should've seen the look on his face when his computer started having conversations with the teacher. -
!rant The end of the world arrives. I have an 8GB Flash USB drive on my keychain. What hacker-ish/prepper stuff should I have already installed on it to take control and survive the apocalypse? Aaaaand...GO!19
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We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)
me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.
I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal... -
Guys, why is everybody complaining about apple usb-c ports? Isn't that the future?
Wait four/five years and it will all be usb-c
I mean, 100% chances of inserting the drive in the computer at first attempt. Fucking rad!11 -
Me yesterday:
"I think I've been too harsh on desktop Linux. Maybe I'll give it one more shot. Ok, debian 9 looks decent."
- Unetbootin fails to recognize usb drive
"Hmmm ok. I'll use ether to to put the iso directly on the drive."
- Bios requires disabling of secure boot
"Uhhh..I guess I'll just disable it in the bios."
- Debian fails to configure network
"Lol fuck this."4 -
Needed my Windows 10 vm for parallax propeller development again. Should be pretty straightforward:
Start VM. Very unresponsive and Interface glitches with 2GB RAM so I give it 4GB to get on the desktop. Bruh, off to a good start.
Turns out that there are a few updates. So I try to install them. After two fucking hours Virtualbox screams at me for being out of storage. FFS Window$ updates managed to take up like 20GB extra.
Had to install it from scratch since my drive is full. Now my key won't activate because it is already activated. 15min support hotline, because 6*8 characters are necessary for a f*cking Phone activation.
Damage assessment:
1h of my life I will never get back, a barely viable operating system and I'm not even sure if USB passthrough works.
PSA:Gnome-Boxen has a superb unattended installer.8 -
I was returning something at MicroCenter the other day. The guy in front of me was picking up a laptop be brought in to have fixed. They had replaced the motherboard, and put all his old data on an external drive.
"So what's this?"
"This is an external hard drive. We copied all the data from your laptop onto it and put a fresh install on it."
"So .. how do I get to it?"
"You just plug it in, over USB."
"So how ... how does that work."
This goes on for a while. Shop owner has to start his computer. Plug in the drive. There was a lot of, "So everything that was on here, is now on here?"
The guy had no basic understanding of external hard drives, USB, copying files ... thankfully while the files were copying from the hard drive to his desktop, he said he needed a longer cable to the router so he could put it on the other side of the room. It took the guy behind the desk an unreasonable amount of time to direct him to the isle with the Ethernet cables, but once he did, I was finally able to return my item.
I'm glad I no longer work in desktop support.1 -
Just got my own server, off to a bad start, it won't boot of my USB drive.
I can say for sure that without an OS, it won't be a very good NAS.6 -
I actually can't really program but I did my first copy and paste program cause I wanted to annoy a friend by opening and closing his cd drive non stop... Well most people don't know what cd drives are these days anyways... Imagine it like your pc constantly unmounting the USB thumbdrive or external HDD.1
-
I bought a new pc and am excited about using it, but, Windows wouldn't be Windows if its installation went flawlessly. Facking Windows.
For 4 evenings I've been trying to get Windows 7 installed on it, and it just fails with the sooooo helpful error message 😑 It's missing a driver for a cd/dvd drive but of course it won't specify which, or where to get it. Moreover, I don't even have a facking cd/dvd drive!! Moronic Windows. (I'm (trying to) install via usb). For fuck sake
I tried everything Google had to offer, but to no avail. Now I am just stuck. Silently sitting there... Not coming up with solutions.
I also don't have another laptop or anything so for every idea/attempt I have to go to friends to get it. It just pisses me off. FACKING Windows11 -
So last night I ran out of space on my root partition, apparently 30GB isn't enough for `/` besides `/home` and `/data` because both `/var` and `/usr` used around 14GB each so I decided to create partitions for them, had 500GB unallocated disk space on my SSD for if I wanted to install windows on my machine besides Arch Linux.
I edited the fstab file and sure enough, the partitions were mounted on boot, everything went fine. Then U realised the data wasn't actually removed from the first partition so I decided to mount the drive again and remove the files, the system still worked fine.
Untill I rebooted. Apparently the bit scripts require files in the`/usr` folder which wasn't mounted at boot, but right after. F*ck, system won't boot and now I'm in a recovery shell in busybox. After googling and reading the arch wiki I noticed a small message saying what you should do if you want to have `/usr` on another partition. I didn't do any of that.
After a couple of hours and a lot of reboots and chroots from a live USB to the broken installation it was fixed without losing any data! I did learn to read the manual or wiki to see any specifics when using more partitions. 😂2 -
Bought myself a new graphics card as my old one died. After i got my system runnning again ( Linux Mint 17), by fixing the video drivers i concluded that i may want to get into gaming again.
I have a free Windows 10 Pro licence lying around so lets try to get dual boot running.
Hmm seems like i cant install windows after linux without installing grub2 again through a recovery disc. Well okay wanted to try out mint 19 anyway.
Downloaded both Isos. Linux mint is 1,5Gb and Windows 10 is 4,3Gb. MS what are you doing ?!
Only have a 4GB USB-Drive and dont want to buy a new one. GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MICROSOFT.
So at a forum i found a software to remove packages from windows isos and now i'm sitting here removing windows bloatware for 4 FUCKING HOURS, JUST TO INSTALL WINDOWS.
Ofc that tool was only windows specific so i had to install windows in a vm first.
Fucking tired of this shit.3 -
A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.
We tried, in order:
Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...
Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.
Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.
Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.
CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.
All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?11 -
The usb drive I just used had a little mechanical switch so that the computer wouldn't recognize it. Why?? When I want to deny a computer access to sth. I just unplug it. It took me ages to figure out what the problem was (the switch was in the same color as the rest of the drive and it is in a really awkward position, also it is dark) and It doesn't make any sense at all. Why, just why?2
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I DONT KNOW WHY BUT UBUNTU 17.04 SET MY ONLY DISK TO /DEV/SDB, I RAN A DD TO DELETE MY USB DRIVE (I TAUGHT IT WAS /DEV/SDB) AND DELETED ALL MY PARTITIONS! F* THIS SHIT, I'M GOING BACK TO ARCH11
-
Needed a flash drive, went to the store and got a SanDisk cruzer blade and figured 16gb for a mix of personal files and the eventual installation of a different distro would be enough.
Got home and went to give some work to my new red friend, my laptop was running lubuntu, used it for like 2 weeks, didn't like it that much, figured I could experiment with mint, downloaded the iso, ran unetbootin and voilá, got a bootable usb drive.
Only that no. I didn't. Tinkered with it the entire fucking day and I couldn't make my laptop's bios recognize it, tried with every possible format that disk utility could format into, tried with 3 different distros and nothing.
Feeling determined to thrash out my current system, I went on a scavenge hunt, trying to find a flash drive anywhere in the house, after a couple hours tossing papers and a number of different things aside, I finally found a 10 years old Verbatim, loaded mint in unetbootin and finally, a bootable usb drive. So thanks Linux god!
By the way, I'm installing xfce mint, anyone have some tips on customizing it?4 -
That day when you need to restart your vsphere virtualizer after 2 and 1/2 years of uptime, just to find it won't boot in any possible way, and you rush to install it fresh on an USB drive 20 mins before your sla runs out... that day was today, fml!
-
The bug I never fixed isn't a bug in code I wrote, but rather an OS problem I've given up on fixing.
I dual-boot Windows and Linux on my desktop PC. Every time Windows updates, it switches from grub to the Windows bootloader, making it impossible to boot into Linux. I've fixed it three times (each time requiring a different fix, from disabling fast startup to reinstalling Grub from a live USB), then gave up. My desktop PC is now a Windows machine. I'm upgrading some parts soon (including replacing my boot drive with an NVMe SSD) so I decided when I do that, I'm just going to reinstall Linux on the new drive and see how long I can last without installing Windows at all.3 -
FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT USB STICK. What the actual fuck how hard can it be to format a usb-stick? Excuse me?
Basically, flashed arch .iso on my usb stick. After stuff was done I want to format my usb stick again so I can put files on it. Normally thats a super easy process. I tried a shitload of things.
1) On windows: Quick format -> Windows was unable to format.
2) Went to Linux. Opened GParted. Gparted didn't detect the usb drive? Wtf. Rebooted then it showed up. Tried to delete all partitions, tried to clear the entire drive. Gparted just freezes. Ok... wtf is going on?
3) Tried to go the bruteforce way and zero out the entire drive with dd. After a few seconds dd freezes and is not doing anything anymore.
Wth is going on lol? Why can I not wipe my usb drive? Any ideas?
9 -
Working two hours on this FFS. Three the same laptops:
- Two USB sticks of different brands working on two of the laptops. One doesn't work.
- BIOS versions: the working two are from 2018 and 2020. The not working one is from 2022.
- BIOS settings: 99% the same, especially where matters. Literally went trough every menu.
- I thought, maybe the 'new' 2022 BIOS has a buggy - so maybe update BIOS? Everything only for windows on Lenovo website.
I installed xubuntu on it before. All laptops say "cant find /boot" but on two of them it's not a problem and they run the live USB stick with option to installii. Since I installed it before, the BIOS version is probably not the issue.
If i close my eyes i see swastika's.
Detail: the not working laptop is the one that i wrote the xubuntu iso to /dev/sda (what was the hard drive, see a few rants ago). For some reason, it aggresively boots from that one. I do see my USB stick working (very busy flashing light). Is it maybe possible that it mounts my HD as installation cdrom? The HD contains those files.
Anyone tips?2 -
I have one Windows and one Apple M1 computer. Our project runs old docker containers and can't upgrade easily. I decided to run the x86 versions of containers on there and use them from my network. Corporate Windows has port blocking so I decided to install linux to a usb drive. I loaded a live install distro and installed it to a second USB drive.
The internal nvme laptop drive somehow had its partition table wiped along the way. I can see files on there in a partition restore tool but alas it isn't becoming bootable again from uefi after doing partition table restore. 😭8 -
Hi fellow devranters,
Just started working for a small engineering company ~10 employees. They have a single guy that have done most og the development work and version control management. Turns out everything was stored om his personal harddrive with a backup on an USB drive. I'm doing the "dirty work" on porting the version control to a network drive. Not ideal, but the boss was insisting on doing it this way. Have anybody encountered anything like this?
2 -
Windows be like: "bro is that a fucking usb drive? I don't have drivers for that"
Linux be like: "Hold on, is that a Millennium Falcon? I've got the drivers for that"10 -
My setup, seeing that people are posting theirs.
+ BenQ 22" monitor
+ Custom-built PC
+ Fried i7 motherboard :(
+ Working i3 motherboard
+ 2 Green fans (top, back)
+ 2 Red fans (front)
+ (not-working-well) CD/DVD disk
+ 2G WD hard drive (not SSD :( )
+ 4-port USB 3.0 hub
+ SD card reader (with 3 more storage devices it can read)
+ Webcam
+ HP DeskJet Ink Advantage
+ Horrible mechanical keyboard
+ Special keys (music player, play/pause, next/prev, etc.)
+ Mouse that doesn't stop glowing
+ Awesome speakers
+ 4 lights
+ Water jumps through the lights whenever audio rises
+ Xbox 360 S (2G internal storage: Ugh)
+ Speakers connected to Xbox 360
+ Desk Lamp
Software:
+ rEFInd
+ Arch Linux
+ Plymouth
+ Systemd
+ i3-gaps (Me)
+ GNOME (full) (for rest of family)
+ NeoVim
+ XTerm
+ Cmus
4 -
Fooling Windows is easy and fun :p
My friend got logged out of windows and recovery option was saying to wipe the syatem. There was important data in the windows ( photos, videos , project ) so I thought of a simple solution.
Booted Linux in USB and live booted it on the system. Linux can read the files from window OS. Simply copied the data to hard drive.
Windows be like Am I a joke to you9 -
Hey, go and buy yourself a good flash drive. Usb 3.2, SanDisk with the mechanism of an automatic switchblade, you know, all the good stuff. You deserve it.8
-
Just finished installing and configuring Arch on a USB drive - because fuck waiting 20m for Windows to boot and log in on slow af college laptops.
-
I have a 128GB USB 3 flash drive. I have it formatted as NTFS as that is the only filesystem that seems to work on both Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10. All the others I tried would have errors and/or corrupt data.
The problem is when I copy say 5GB of data to the drive on Ubuntu, it shows a file copying dialog, and then completes. Then I go to unmount the drive and it takes about 5 minutes to finish unmounting. It always brings up a dialog on the desktop saying do not remove the drive.
What is going on that it takes that long to unmount?19 -
So i kind of fucked up...
I am currently living out of town and only have my laptop and rpi with me. Wanting to try something new, i decided to challenge myself to only use linux until i get back home, but i also wanted a new distro. (Oh and btw my only internet connection is provided by my phone and tablet, which is used as a hotspot, and because i already used all of my monthly data on the tablet now i only have my phone and an unlimited 128kbps connection which turns into a decent connection only after 11pm)
I downloaded the distro image last night and was planning to install it today, so i shutdown the laptop immediately after the download finished). If only i remembered that i had already wiped the old linux partition containing GRUB.
So now i need to wait until 11 pm so i can download another image on my rpi and flash it to my usb drive. Fuck me...
I guess i'll relax until then.1 -
Me: "Ok, downloaded the (windows) iso, now I need to create a bootable usb"
* Pulls out 4Gb usb drive *
Father: "That iso won't fit on that one"
M: "Oh yeah right, do you have one for me"
F: "Sure"
* hands over 64Gb usb drive *
M: "thanks"
* Checks content *
* "Backups 15" directory and other old files *
"Guess I can use that"
* dds iso on usb drive *
dd: "done"
M: * Reboots *
Pc: "Nani the fuck is that supposed to be"
M: * searches online for solutions, tries out 2 different ones, one being provided by microsoft *
P: "lol no"
F: * comes in *
"Is it working?"
M: "Nah, windows a bitch"
F: "ok, can you copy me some files on the usb in the meantime?"
M: "Sure..."
{ How did he know that the drive is currently empty? }
* copies files onto stick *
F: * sees empty usb drive*
"Did you delete the contents on the usb?"
M: "Kinda, that happens when you create a bootable usb drive"
F: "..."
M: "Why do you ask, was the something important on the drive?"
F: "Idk, doesn't matter anyways now, since the contents are gone"
Btw, it still doesn't boot from the usb drive. Windows 10 iso is a bitch.7 -
Anything made by asus is a fucking garbage.
My first asus laptop was eee pc 701. It had only 2 gigabytes “ssd” which was just a flash drive using usb 2.0 inside. Doing this instead of using a proper sata ssd is like using bunch of rats glued to a frisbee instead of roomba vacuum. It displayed “intel 800mhz processor” in settings but this was only the processor’s name string, in fact it was only 640mhz single core. I still managed to install totally stripped version of windows xp to it and play some old games but overall it was horrible. It also heated up as hell.
My second asus laptop was infamous z99h. It had windows vista and was slow as hell right out of the box. Also BOTH hinges broke in just like six months. It was horrible as well. The screen itself broke in a year.
I also used asus rt-series router and it required a restart every day just to deliver some wifi. Don’t you dare tell me to “uPdATe fIrMwArE”, I pay money for the product and I expect it to work right outside the box.
Asus smartphones was also garbage.
So why have asus laptop if you can have a real laptop like MacBook or thinkpad? Why have asus phone if you can have a real smartphone like iPhone or pixel? Why have asus router if you can have ubiquiti?
Asus drivers suck, and all of asus software is just bloatware.10 -
So on my computer I have 3 drives. I had two m.2 ssds and one sata ssd. I thought I had misc data on my sata. Turns out I had it on the second m.2. So I have been running my game installs off of the slower sata... I found out because I am updating my m.2 drives to 2TB from 1TB. What is funny is the data on the second m.2 is just temp storage. So I pulled it and put my new second m.2 2T drive to clone from the sata. It was failing to clone over usb for some reason. Not sure if software or something with drive. Cloning in process so will find out soon. The funny part is this makes it easier to update because I was using drives wrong. DOH!
It will be nice going from 3TB to 5TB. Woot!2 -
Trying to install Linux off of a USB drive when motherboard flips put during boot mode and boots back into windows saying that it is not secure. Even though I've tested this drive and installed Linux on other computers. ugh1
-
currently backing up a micro-usb pendrive with the following method:
I have mounted my usb hard drive on my raspberry
I have mounted the raspberry on my phone using sshfs
Now I'm dd-ing the pendrive (the device) to the mounted disk on the phone.3 -
Let me tell you about my wonderful weekend. It all started with a game that doesn't run in wine and it ended up in the biggest nightmare of Windows Update and EFI configuration.
1 - let's boot on my Windows partition to play trackmania 2.
2 - Windows Update interrupts me while driving a track.
3 - Update keep failing over and over again.
4 - I keep trying things to fix Windows Update, but with no success.
5 - Let's try system restore, failed
6 - Let's try to do a reset. "You don't have a recovery drive". Oh, right...
7 - Let's try to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 10, just because. Nope, "we could not determine if your pc can run Windows 10". Wait what....
8 - I guess I'll be reinstalling this trash. "Nope, can't. Don't like that partition I just formatted". Of course you can't...
9 - Had to delete the partition and let it create new ones. It created a new EFI partition. Just why???
10 - Okay that worked. Let's fix grub now.
11 - Maybe not, let's try rEFInd, because it looks fancy.
12 - After rebooting on the live USB for about 50 times and reconfiguring rEFInd without any luck, I realised the install script didn't install fs drivers for ext4. Oh, right... That's why you didn't find any Linux kernel...
13 - It can't boot windows, they're using a different EFI partition. Let's move rEFInd to the new EFI partition windows created for me.
14 - Finally everything works again. So much effort to play a freaking game without being bothered by windows update. And rEFInd abience theme looks beautiful.
I've got to say though, I learned a lot and the Arch wiki is awesome!6 -
Was running personal laptop on 4.10 kernel (running Manjaro).
Was having problems for some reason with an audio program I'm using and so needed to run some older kernel that is real time for better latency.
Installed that kernel and booted with it.
Attempted to remove kernel 4.10, I don't need it anymore.
Rebooted, some kernel modules aren't loading. Xorg not creating a session.
I have no input working.
Not even wifi.
I can't detect USB devices.
Tried to fix it all night.. going through a ton of forums online...
Finally I give up. I didn't have access to anther computer to get a bootable USB image to. FUCK. IM NOT SMART ENOUFG FOR THIS SHIT.
I have 3 USB drive that I carry around all the time. Why don't I have a live image in one of them?
I went to sleep.
Next day I download Lubuntu (just to boot and backup some stuff before downloading and reinstalling Manjaro).
When I was burning the ISO to the USB, turns out I actually had a bootable Ubuntu on it the whole time.
I feel so stupid.
Last week I don't remember why, but I did sudo chmod 770 /
Which also broke my system.
Took me 3 hours to realize that this was the problem and make it work.
I love Linux. It keeps things interesting..3 -
Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.
During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.
I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.
I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.
Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)
I never want that to happen again -
I logged in a Remote Server, where Bi-Directional was disabled.Didn't allowed copy-paste and needed to upload a new Web app release.
Hack: just inserted usb flash drive in my computer and remote server recognised that as external.
Deployment completed!4 -
Me and my coworker shares internet cable because the it departement haven't plugged in all the cables at the other end. It's primitive... Like sharing a usb flash drive, but worse5
-
Ok... Can someone explain me this?
Happen a few weeks ago.
My pc would crach on any 3D program or game.
Did some tests, was the graphic card.
Send it to repair (amd, Asus made)
Placed my old Nvidia, installed drivers all good.
My new card came, nothing repaired, nothing found, passed all stress tests.
Placed the card back ok, no OS.
Bios detects both ssds but don't start (windows 10.... Ya tryed Linux but doesn't work for my main past time in pc, Arma 3).
Loaded the USB with the windows instalation, used command line drive C is completely empty but has 160gb used.
Ended ip formating.
GC works perfectly.
So... Wtf happen?8 -
concept: a PCI/PCI-e/SATA/IDE device allowing for booting from a "HDD" which is, in reality, EPROM. Not EEPROM, EPROM. For purposes of, say, having an uninfectable copy of HBCD 15.2 or HBCD 10 PE you can insert and forget about without consuming a USB slot or disc drive.2
-
!rant
I had that installation of windows 3 to 4 years now.
I'm using a third party software for backup so everyday at 23:00 the backup service starts. The image is stored on a second HDD.
First i want to point out that i set up the windows maintenance around that time too. So any updates should occur then and i remember finding my PC at login screen couple of times meaning a restart had taken place.
Everything was fine all this time.
Couple of days ago i returned home late around 2 am to find a blue screen saying that the computer did not boot property the last time. Had two options, just restart or try to fix.
Of course i will fix it, come on.
Everything failed. Everything. Even safe mode won't boot.
Who cares i have the back up system image. Boot from the bootable usb stick and restore. Well nothing is happening. It's just freezing at 5%. Cancel. Try again. Cancel. Verify the image. Success! Try again! Nothing.
Damn. Im really tired, off to bed.
Woke up tried fixing and restore but to no avail.
Fuck it i will just install Windows fresh. I was set up after an hour or so installed the necessary drivers and such. Let's see that image of any file i want to get back.
Image is corrupted. What the fuck? How? Damn it. Mount and recovery also failed.
That's it. I did not lose any important files. I save everything on a different drive and also the backup.
But I'm wondering what had gone wrong.
My guess windows rebooted when the backup was running. If that's the case shouldn't be a check if such service is running?2 -
Spent all afternoon and night, trying to get Windows reinstalled on my old college laptop because my dad needed another pc since I'll be using his personal laptop to wfh.
1. DVD Drive is faulty, slow/faulty reads
2. I don't have product keys (they're all stores on a USB disk, I should make a backup... that I didn't bring back to their place) except for Vista and Win 8 but Win 8 key already used by another PC. I have a burned Win 7 disc
3. Apparently it had a virus which was never removed, fresh reinstall never done. It hides the DVD drives and kills the internet and makes the installers think there's only 400MB.
4. I followed some wiki that said to Mark the C drive as Active... Which fixed the issue but then I decided to do the full install from boot... Except on reboot, apparently this fcked up the MBR
5. Tried googling how to fix the MBR, eventually found some USB app that supposedly fixes it. Create a USB boot disk, not recognized
6. Finally try the DVDs and release it recognize them somewhat when booting... Win 7 one kept hanging on the load screen
7. Somehow Vista got thru and actually installed...
Now IE and Chrome both complain about HTTPS issues and how they don't support Vista...
But at least my dad now had a laptop he can use to do non-work stuff while he uses his company laptop to do work.12 -
So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.
So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).
There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.1 -
Was waiting for my usb drive to show up on my computer to watch a certain tv show, but realized it wasn't plugged into the computer... At least I die wait hours...
-
I brought my laptop on vacation, but I left my archiso USB drive at home, assuming I wouldn't break anything.
I broke networkmanager. I just added a connection, it worked flawlessly, but for some reason it is now a reason to stop booting. It enters emergency mode, but I can't type anything... Possibly because it doesn't have read/write access or something idk.
But how on Earth would this break my system??? I'm beginning to understand why some people dislike systemd sometimes...
I guess I'll fix it when I come home...6 -
Is it hard to write a kernel module to expose information to usee space ? I need smartctls abilitytl to specify sata being transported over. USB cable to a sata drive to pull Information like make model serial but it requires root and lsblk doesn't have the functionality to grab info on the device on the other end of the usb to sata cable
There is another way though right ?4 -
3rd time trying to create a bootable windows usb drive. UEFI simply not finding it in ntfs. Now trying with fat32 as suggested. If that doesn't work, I'll have to kindly ask y grandfather to let me use the pc for a while. Getting so sick of this2
-
Should I switch from windows to Linux? I'm a college student doing CS and most stuff I've seen on GitHub and such mainly have installation instructions on Linux.
I've heard a bunch of my friends go "dude if you code, consider switching to linux"
Is it worth making the switch? Should I dual boot my laptop or completely switch? Or could I make do with a bootable USB drive?9 -
!rant
Hello, I am software engineer student and I am still learning but I would like to start a project to help a friend. The idea is to create a simple DB to manage stock of products, generate a few barcodes and have a few other simple things... btw the program needs to run on a small usb drive... yeah no server or anything.... but has do be like this for now. I was thinking about creating a QT interface for him to interact with the DB (sqlite3, is for a small shop), and for the extra functionalities. However I remembered of you guys and would like to ask for advice :) (I know there are free solutions for his needs, but I wanted to take the opportunity to learn more C++ and improve myself as a developer)4 -
Don’t really put stickers on my laptop, however the rectangular DevRant one has done a great job marking my primary external USB drive since I got it...
-
So my TV tuner outputs the videos as 1-20GB TS files... To my secondary 1TB HDD...
But that's my main storage drive too. And well I'm recording every week and maybe transcribing some to keep.
Also seems for Plex, need to transcribe to mp4 beforehand.
So now I'm worried about drive failure, seems most DVR drives last around 2-4yrs... depending on use...
Wondering if I need an external USB "throwaway drive" or another internal, not sure whether there's an empty slot, need to check -
Ram drives are a very good and useful thing why has no one made a nice ram drive caddy using laptop ram, the speeds on the older ram and drives out do any drive on the market and the unit is not a lot to make, I happy to put some old DDR 2 ram a new life as a USB ram drive using as a page or swop drive or Live CD Drive.
Or am I missing something and they really hiding somewhere, the ram drives I seen are stupid price and offer functions we don't need or aimed at big server companies but this would really help privacy, or better still anyone know if we can make some kind of ram drive with maybe a maker board and laptop ram ?1 -
!rant
My home pc has developed a sudden issue and wont boot up anymore.
Stays stuck on the POST phase and am unable to get into BIOS , just stuck with a big asus logo and a message to press
F2 or Delete to get into BIOS but the system seems frozen as the keyboard lights are on but unresponsive while the
Mobo reads an error code A2
( the manual claims that to be an IDE error although am using only SATA)
Unplugging all usb doesnt change anything.
Unplugging all other sata ssd ,hdd and disk drives except the os drive changes nothing.
Unplugging the os drive results in the system complaining about no bootmgr
(As expected), that allows me to at least look at the BIOS but there doesnt seem to be anything wrong or out of the ordinary..
Booting from a live cd works fine
Booted from a pc boot repair tool and plugged in the os drive into one of the hot swappable sata ports shows me the all the files still there and accessible , check disk revealed nothing wrong. Can't plug in the os drive pre boot as that locks everything up again)
Tried to boot with a windows cd then do a start up repair but plugging in the os drive into the hot swappable sata doesn't work since windows can't see the drive.
Tried to swap the os drive with another one of exact same model filled witb random files resulted in no boot mgr error as expected
Struggled a whole weekend to fix it but alas no progress
Ah and the OS drive's warranty ran out 2 weeks ago 😑
Mobo asus p9x79 deluxe
Os ssd samsung 840 250 gb
No changes in hardware for the last year
Or so
No BIOS changes in over a year
I did notice some odd files like 0002Found
On the os drive when i was using the boot repair live cd tool, will bring the drive to
The office where i can get my hands on an ssd sata to usb caddy and take a snapshot of The files there for you guys to see.
Any ideas ? 😞5 -
Nine hours... friggin nine hours..
Reinstalled my machine and forgot to save my workflow scripts so I first had to recover from a backup, copy my scripts to a USB drive and do the reinstall again.. -
So yesterday, when I went to someone else in our office to look how their pc build ended up, I decided to help them setting up windows
All pcs there are on windows 7 except for personal laptops, which I left home because I rarely need it there my colleague was working on his laptop though, so I was obviously gonna use a Windows 7 PC.
I didn't want to use 3rd party software, not because I'd think they're bad, just because I did it with the cmd a few times in the past, so I erased the USB stick and made it bootable, after that I remembered that win 7 can't mount drives without 3rd party software, but tried stuff from the Internet about xconfig, it didn't work (also I got a bit off track trying to automate some stuff of it with a .bat file cause I got tired of doing it manually)
After hassling with it for 2 hours I told my colleague to give me his laptop, mounted the drive and copied the stuff over, plugged it into the other pc and started the setup.
What annoys me is that I didn't even think of just opening the archive with 7zip or something and moving it over, or using Windows 10 in the first place...
Further, I tried to make a multiboot USB stick with different OSs today, 15 minutes of Google and a bit less for actually getting the stuff on the drive and I was done, my stupidity and stubbornness won't get in the way of installing Windows does anymore...
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