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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
sdb…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Final Question: What was the biggest computer blunder you’ve ever made?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … <\/p>\n