Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am working on upgrading ButtonMash to a decently sized hard drive. Let’s get started!
I am humbled to know that Creepers_n_Cream has been a well-loved server. I’m actually impressed at how well God has blessed my efforts given I put it together on a budget of nothing but what I had laying around. We’ve had somewhere between twenty and thirty unique accounts stop by, and we have about ten regulars in our community.
With abundant use comes abundant taxation on the hardware. Even though the RAM situation has been stable since I implemented G1GC not all the bottlenecks are fully addressed yet. The CPU gets pegged if more than a couple people are on at a time, and 60 gigabytes of hard drive space only goes so far when you aren’t deleting old weekly backups.
A few weeks ago, I woke up to the server crashing royally. It had finally finished topping off the tiny hard drive I gave it to start with. My family discussed it, and we eventually ordered a one terabyte solid state drive to install.
The first step is to get the operating system installed. Unsure where my original MineOS installation media went, I located a thumb drive and it mounted as sdd. It had a bunch of old Minecraft servers I could offload.
With the drive void of contents, I pulled up a tutorial on burning .iso disk images to thumb drives from the command line in Linux. As soon as I saw the dd command, I remembered a warning that it might as well stand for “disk destroyer.” Its actual name is Data Duplicator. Aside from working in the command line, there was nothing new about this situation.
Following the tutorial, I wrote a vFAT file system to sdb. Oops, I spelled it “sufo” instead of “sudo.” Correcting my typo, I tried again…
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sdb…
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I used the lsblk (list block) command to bring up all partitions of any disks connected to the drive. I felt the color drain from my face as I inspected the table.
I had heard the warnings. I had double checked. Years worth of memories –gone– in only a minute. This is why you always isolate potentially destructive work by using a computer you can easily rebuild; always minimize the chance of damages with an air gap! Always!
I had goofed. At least I hear this is the mistake you only ever make once. In the fallout, I checked around for a backup, and I found something from last December. It doesn’t have much, but at this point, I just have to trust my past self that I got the stuff that’s most important. As luck would have it, of my three most important personal drives, that was the only one I actually have any sort of backup for, and it’s the only one that wasn’t still in daily use.
I continued with putting MineOS on the terabyte SSD. I used my main tower, but its external Wi-Fi card didn’t register, so I put the project down for now while I focus on recovering my hard drive.
As of writing, I still don’t fully understand the damage, but I’ll try explaining it as best I can. Most of the data is still there. All that really happened was that I shredded the hard drive’s internal map and laid out a fresh one, marking everything ready for redevelopment. If I can somehow survey the abandoned data, I should be able to rebuild the original map.
Fortunately, there are recovery tools I can try. The one I’m trying to work with right now is called TestDisk. I believe it should be able to achieve a full recovery, if used correctly.
But that’s the thing. I don’t know how to use it correctly. I’m terrified that I’ve only got one shot, and if I miss, it’s possible the failed recovery process will cause farther damage, and I won’t be able to try again.
I’m hardly the first person to nuke a hard drive by accident. There are other options around, but I’m still scared that I won’t get a second chance once I try any one of them. The best case for me would be if I found someone else who had written a vFAT filesystem over an NTFS filesystem and replacing two visible partitions, but the creation of such a tutorial would be pointless, as there are way more possible combinations to the point that there isn’t enough demand to justify the supply.
I need to put this project down for a while. I’ve reached out to the Third Workshop, but with the pandemic on, “after school” STEM programs are online only. Otherwise, I have a couple topics I can develop for the next couple weeks. I really want my drive back.
Final Question: What was the biggest computer blunder you’ve ever made?