social.noyu.me

lmao my plan to quadruple the storage space on my pc is being thwarted by the fact the usb nvme ssd dock i bought only has a usb-c connector

i'm… gonna have to use my gf's laptop to do the ssd cloning ahahaha

turns out in 2024 having a computer with only usb-a ports is a liability. all my adapters and hubs only go in the usb-a to usb-c direction. i never thought it would happen!

‪like to me usb-c is still that thing you have on laptops and usb-a is the Serious one, and i do not buy hubs with usb-c ports on them because everything i want to connect is usb 2.0 or, rarely, usb 3.0‬

‪next hurdle: why does my ubuntu usb flash drive crash every time i try to boot it on my gf's laptop?‬

‪answer: it has an nvidia gpu. log in with x windows instead of wayland. lmfao‬

‪oh shit you can pass 'status=progress' as an argument to dd and it'll actually give you periodic transfer status updates i wish i knew this before‬

‪1TB (932GiB) copied in 2306s, that's not bad‬

advantages of this ship-of-theseus'd disk content being MBR: dd'ing the old ssd to the new one Just Works

disadvantages: this new ssd is 4TB. guess what the max size for an MBR partitioned disk is??? (it's less,,,,)

followed the first four steps of https://askubuntu.com/a/1315273 to convert the MBR disk to GPT (windows's tool for this refuses to do it on a non-empty disk), let's see if this hosed the windows install; hoping startup repair can fix it

‪startup repair didn't fix it, i guess it was too cursed. i'm instead installing windows 8.1 with some product key i found online (my burned windows 10 dvd has rotted but my windows 8.1 one is still good), since i know that'll create a usable gpt windows bootloader setup‬

‪disk partitioning and bootloaders are so goddamn arcane‬

‪installing windows 8.1 is so nostalgic, i miss when microsoft weren't evil‬

and hello again from windows 10! i did need to do a little manual fixing up from the windows 8.1 side; with its bootlader installed, i could go into the windows 8.1 recovery command prompt and do bootrec /rebuildbcd to make it find and add windows 10 to the boot list ^^

as a "computers person" i do not know how to solve the problem correctly the first time, what i do have is an endless list of strange tactical maneuvers that might solve a problem and an ability to prioritise them

@hikari

This is so accurate

@hikari and having a borderline pathological determination to “solve it”.

@hikari reminded me of a Taken-copypasta :3

@hikari This is so uncanny.
@sounddrill Us fixing our device trees.

@hikari Solve a problem..."correctly"? Is that a thing? :)

@hikari So true. I think what annoys about first-line support is that, because they’ve been trained and not had practical experience, they all use the same sorting algorithm, regardless of the situation. I think this explains Greenspun's tenth rule … we all eventually hit, “well in lisp what I’d do is …”

This may even explain my friends who I think are brilliant. They have better sorting algorithms and a few extra tactics :).