Notices by Cobalt (cobalt@musicians.today), page 2

@kaia upscale the picture to the full 128gb to symbolize that you don't have room for anyone else

the finnish dictionary I use is sanakirja dot org. the japanese dictionary I use is jisho dot org. both have the same dot org TLD, and both literally just mean "dictionary". coincidence? I think not

thread about fixing my brother's PC✨

symptoms: it doesn't turn on, but he wants to repurpose it

externally it's in rough, but not bad shape. just some grime on the panels and three of the rubber feet are missing. internally, it's what you'd expect. just years worth of dust.

I was gonna test the PSU with a multimeter, but apparently my probes have gone bad. I'm gonna bring it to school tomorrow and check it during recess. for now I will try to power it with my main PC's PSU. I see no visual damage anywhere, so I don't think it's the power supply but better safe than sorry

I ripped the hard drive out, but my system is unable to mount it. it's also very slow. at first it showed up as "one bad sector" in GNOME Disks, but now that I looked at it again to double check it for this post, it apparently has 49392 bad sectors lmao. reckon dd would be able to make a mountable image? with these speeds it would probably take more than 24h (I sleep in the same room as my PC so can't run it overnight) as it's a 3TB disk.

...well, I WOULD have tried it with my main PC's PSU but then I remembered the CPU power connector is buried under the comically large Noctua NH-D15. honestly I just cba to disassemble that right now so I'll just wait until tomorrow when I've tested the PSU

oh man, these folks have proper good setups here

an ATX power supply won't turn on just sitting on the table with nothing connected to it. you have to cheat it by bridging pins 16 (PS-ON) and any ground - the closest is right above it on pin 15 or below on pin 17. even a piece of solder will do, it's just a logic signal and doesn't carry any proper electricity.

I am pleased to report that the PSU is perfectly healthy. all the voltages were as expected. it's a PSU from a brand I hadn't heard of from 2013, so I wasn't really expecting that haha

there was a bunch of dust, but nothing unmanageable. having a brush attachment for a vacuum cleaner is a godsend in these situations, can just wave it around which will knock the dust loose and immediately suck it up. I suspect there had been something spilled on the computer, as there was some kind of a dark patch at the bottom of the front cover. soda maybe? it came right off with a scrubbing pad

honestly is it even tinkering if you don't have to scrape off decade old thermal paste from the CPU? now this is pod racing

cleaned it up, swapped out the caked-on thermal paste from the CPU, put the PSU back in, all that fun stuff. I got it to boot into an image of arch, so I'm positive that the reason it wasn't booting was because of the hard drive going bad. for some reason none of the OSes on my ventoy would load when the stick was plugged into the front panel - bad port or something? whatever. I can boot into an OS and that's good enough for now

what I'm gonna do now is go and take a shower. after the bathroom dries up completely tomorrow, I'm gonna chuck the machine in there and attempt to clone the failing drive with dd to see if I can salvage his old data from it. it's most probably gonna take a LONG time (just having the drive connected added about 10 seconds to booting into BIOS) so can't have it in the same room as I sleep in. if that fails then I'll just have to break the bad news to him. remember to keep backups, kids!

before and after on one of the side panels haha the other wasn't as bad as this one

the bathroom has dried up. I'll move the computer there and set up dd. after that, we play the waiting game.

a perfectly normal sight in any computer toucher household

sadly, no dice with dd. errored out within the first 40 seconds lol

the data is still on the disk and could probably be recovered by a specialist but I don't happen to have an ISO Class 5 clean room lying around (a shame, I know!) so I'm gonna call it broken beyond repair

make backups, kids! be glad this wasn't your data. even a simple thumb stick will suffice

I was recommended ddrescue, which is able to persist through read errors. I have no idea how it calculates the time remaining, as it keeps jumping around from 2 days to 2 weeks. anyway, it seems to be doing a good job, I'll let that run for however long it needs. no showers for me for the time being lol I'm gonna become a (stinks good) kinda guy for a while

so it took approx. 12h30min to rescue 10% of the disk. we can approximate the estimate for completion - 12h30min is 750 minutes. 750 times 10 is 7500. this is going to take approximately 125 hours total. subtracting the 12h30min gives us the final estimate, which is 112h30min or 4.68 days.

thankfully I have sauna tomorrow so it's not like I'll have to go completely showerless, but that still leaves a couple of days with no bathing. honestly is it even computer touching if you DON'T stink good?

update: 40% done in approx. 1d23h40min. this gives a new estimate of about 2 days 23h remaining

copying stopped at 98.39%, as the disk I was copying to ran out of space. I had accounted for this at the start, as I figured the dying disk has 700GB unallocated space at the end of the drive so it's probably fine. total estimate for the run was 4 days and 21 hours, and we ended it prematurely at 98.39% with a run time of 4 days, 12 hours and 3 minutes. estimate was pretty good tbh.

time for sleep now though, I'll inspect the results tomorrow

tried to repair the file system, but that refuses to work. I guess I'll just have to go with what's available.

oh man, the filesystem is toast. everywhere you look you get I/O errors. the majority of the data is still there but about 1/5th of files return an I/O error as I'm rsyncing everything to my own hard drive.