Technology

PC Hardware

Hard Drive Woes Part 2

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This post is a follow up to my previous Dead Hard Drive post.

I used to hassle with PC hardware a LOT more than I currently do. I’ve kind of worked my way out of that gig honestly. I am at a point where I can afford shit for starters, mostly, so I’m not trying to cobble together workable machines from random parts. I also got tired of doing tech support for people, so I basically just, sort of hide that I can, because when people find out you can “fix computers”, now you’re vacuuming out 50 years of dust from a Pentium 1 in your backyard for a neighbor who refuses to just buy literally any cheapest machine at Wal-Mart for an infinite performance boost.

“Back in my day!” (fist shaking), you could pretty much just slap any drive with an Operating system in any machine and it would boot. Sometimes it would boot into an ugly driverless environment because it was ripped from another machine, but that was fixable. Things seem more complicated these days. I’m not blaming UEFI, and all that more secure BIOS stuff, but it’s a likely culprit. I think that better security is good, it just, is also part of why I can’t more conveniently fix my damn PC.

I say Conveniently, because that’s the core issue. I can still EASILY do it. It’s just… not convenient.

Shortly after messing with Linux a bit for troubleshooting, I did a bit of set up to use it as the main driver but, decided to just go back to Windows. I downloaded a fresh recovery image, sliced the Linux partition down to 500GB and reinstalled Windows.

I like Linux. I use Linux, almost daily, if not daily. It’s great for automation tasks and running server software and all that. It, kind of really sucks as a desktop OS. Don’t get me wrong, it’s usable, especially for simpler needs (literally anything not Gaming or Video/Photo Editing). I have run Linux as the sole OS on many machines, mostly laptops, and lots of Pis and Servers. I’ve used Linux off and on for over 20 years now. The problem here is, the main use case for my “Kick ass gaming rig” is well, gaming. Half the games I had slated “to play” from Steam are not available in Linux. I set up Hero Launcher for GOG and Epic, but like, my cloud saves didn’t work, and Fortnite doesn’t work and the whole thing felt a little off. Graphics also felt a little off, even though I did switch to using the official proprietary NVidia drivers.

Anyway, I went back to Windows. I spent an eternity downloading drivers and doftware and getting things set up properly. Unfortunately, the secondary drive I was now using as my primary, is just too slow to handle the needs of a lot of games as well. I had to roll Fortnite back to DirectX 11 for example, because it would take like 10 minutes to drop into a match because it would load shaders or some shit. For anyone not aware of how Fortnite works, it’s online, in an arena of players. If you drop in 10 minutes late, your character will have already landed in the map and probably be dead or dying.

So I bit the bullet and bought a new NVME drive. I planned to eventually, I just, did it sooner.

I went and downloaded Clonezilla to just mirror the Hard Drive to the NVME drive, which worked, but things would not boot.

There are plenty of possible solutions online, with recovery mode. I tried a few of them. But in the end, I have opted to just, reinstall Windows, again.

Which means redownloading drivers and shit… again….

I might be able to pull the Steam Downloads over before wiping the secondary drive, but I am not sure Epic will let me do that. Unfortunately, the larger games are from Epic, with Fortnite, Death Stranding and Final Fantasy 7R in that list.

It’s all, very easy.

It’s just all, very inconvenient.

Also, just because, and maybe for future reference, the install needs:

  • Network Driver – For some reason it doesn’t work on the generic.
  • TUF Gaming Amoury Crate – The motherboard seems to load this, and it find and installs all the drivers, which is nice, despite the cheesy name.
  • Windows Update
  • Color Scheme to Dark, no transparency
  • Firefox – Browser of choice, then log into sync and let it pull all my stuff in.
  • Steam
  • Epic
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Change One Drive settings to not sync everything but only some things.
  • Log into the Microsoft Account so One Drive and Office work, since no network driver means local account log in only at first
  • Share X – For Screenshots to folders
  • Display Fusion – For rotating desktop wallpaper
  • Synergy KVM – So I can connect to my other PC\
  • EVGA Flow Control – For the cooler
  • Remove all the cruft from the start menu, remove the apps list and recent files
  • Add a dozen network drives to File Exporer
  • Discord
  • Firestorm Viewer
PC Hardware

A Dead Hard Drive

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I came down last night to drop some stuff off in the basement and shut the curtains, and sat down to check on something at my desktop PC, I don’t even remember what, and was slightly surprised to see that it was sitting at the BIOS Screen and not the Windows lock screen. My first assumption was, it did an update or something, and the cat was sitting on the keyboard, and cause it to enter the BIOS. They don’t usually sit on the keyboard, but it’s possible.

I rebooted the PC, and…. it just loaded the BIOS again.

Clearly something more than a cat issue.

Both the 1TB M2 NVMe drive and the 2TB add on drive were showing in the BIOS menu, but no boot options were showing available. In fact, it even specifically said something along the lines of “No boot options.” I tried resetting the BIOS settings back to factory default, I had toggled a few things so I could do virtualization, and it was no help.

I dug out a USB key with Linux and booted to that. I mostly wanted to see if I could access the drive still at all. This had to be done with an extremely weird and annoying bright yellow screen where everything was washed out. The Live OS would boot fine and look fine, until it actually got to the point of letting me do anything, when it suddenly seemed to give up it’s video driver causing everything to go wonky.

I managed to squint my way through it and the drive shows up, but it’s not accessible at all.

So I swapped out Ubuntu for a Windows Recovery USB Key. The recovery options (restore, recovery, etc) all failed. These gave a bit more information that the drive was “locked”. I tried a few more options at the command line that I found,

  • bootrec /fixMBR
  • bootrec /fixBoot
  • bootrec /rebuildBCD

But none of these changed anything. I could probably download and run a Windows ISO, but for the moment, I’ve decided on a different route. I booted back into Ubuntu, and just installed that on my 2TD spare drive. It would not take on the 1TB NVMe drive, and the 2TB secondary drive was just all games anyway, so nothing of value would be lost by wiping it clean.

I might, MIGHT just try running this way for a while, though it does have some disadvantages. Mostly, games. Almost everything I’ve been actively playing lately was through the Epic store. And a lot of the games I planned to get to in Steam, don’t work in Linux. There are ways to get them to work though, which I want to look into, but I have not had time yet. I do know Fortnite is flat out not going to work. Not a huge loss, I am kind of getting tired of it again anyway. It has some strict Anti-Cheat which won’t run in any sort of emulated environment.

I also still have my old desktop too I can use. So well, Fortnite may not be out completely, it just, won’t run quite as nice. In fact, I can probably run most of the stuff I want on that machine that won’t work directly in Ubuntu.

Another thing worth mentioning, I am not really out anything file wise. A handful of downloaded files for “TODO” projects that I could download again. I basically never work with files directly on any particular system anymore, it’s always files on the NAS or files in One Drive. The only thing I really lost were the handful of custom Stable Diffusion Embeddings I had created, and I have been meaning to try to rebuild better versions of those anyway.

It will be interesting to see how performance is compared to Windows though. This PC is a pre built gaming PC, so I am sure it’s been somewhat optimized for use with Windows. I have not had a chance to really test it out in a Linux environment at all yet, but I’m interested to see the results. I’d already been toying with the idea of running Linux on this machine but I was worried about how it would handle things like the water cooler. I already don’t have the ability to control the lights on my Keyboard and Mouse, but there may be software to do that available if I look into it.

All in all, I am irritated that the drive died, but I’ve taken it much more in stride than one might expect. I will probably poke at the Windows system some more as well though. The drive doesn’t really act like it’s dead, more like, it’s got some sort of software glitch going on.

Technology

ActivityPub and WordPress

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The whole concept of the “Fediverse” and decentralization has been gaining a lot of traction lately, especially with the recent bull shit around Twitter. I’ve had a Mastodon account for a few years and have tried a few times to get into the whole ActivityPub decentralized thing a few times over the year after hearing it discussed on the TWIT Podcast a few times.

With the recent news of Automattic (owners of WordPress) buying the most popular Activity Pub plug in, I’ve decided to give it another go. So I’ve re-enabled the plug in, and actually made a better effort to look into what it means, and it, was, surprisingly pretty simple. I am sure it can do more, but basically, both of my blogs can now be followed on other ActivityPub based Fedi-verse systems. Specifically, the two accounts, for now, are:

@JoshMiller@lameazoid.com

and

@JoshMiller@bloggingintensifies.com

I followed both, basically, the easy way, is to slap one or the other in the search box on Mastodon or a Mastodon app, and they show up like any other account. I checked, and though the post is very long, and the images don’t show properly, sure enough, it shows up in Tusky.

i could see some fun possibilities here, though I don’t know that anyone cares enough to actually follow any of it in the first place. The first I’ll probably try, i have a system that posts blobs of links that I share via Fresh RSS daily (if there is anything to share). These currently just post with me as the author. However, I could easily change this to another user, say, “LinkBot” and give it a separate feed, so @linkbotLinkBot@bloggingintensifies.com could be followed, just for those links.

I could make other sub accounts like this too, maybe I could have one that’s just a feed of random food photos. I could set up something on Lameazoid for toy photos or video games screen shots.

I will add in that the concept is neat, but I also am not sure I really prefer it to just straight RSS. It seems a bit overly complicated when “Really Simple Syndication” is a thing.

Linux & Open Source

SQL Woes

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For the most part, managing my web server is pretty straightforward, especially because I don’t really get a ton of traffic. Its mostly just keeping things up to date through standard channels.

Occasionally I have a bit of a brain fart moment. I recently was doing regular Linux updates on the server. I noticed a message I had seen before about some packages being held back. Occasionally I will go through and update these, because I am not real sure why they are being held back, but don’t really see any reason they should be.

Then MySQL broke.

So I went digging in some logs and searching for solutions, and decided I needed to roll back the version. Following a guide I found, I discovered… I had done this before, which I now vaguely remebered. Because the old .deb file was still there from last time I broke it.

Anyway, this didn’t fix it, MySQL still was not launching.

I decided that maybe it was time to just switch to MariaDB, which I believe is the spiritual successor to MySQL. And the process was simple enough, I would not even need to dump my Databases. So I uninstalled MySQL, installed MariaDB and… It worked!

Then it stopped working.

I restarted the SQL service and it worked!

Then it…. Stopped working… Again…

So I checked logs again and corrected some issues there and again it worked, then a half hour or so later it stopped working.

One thing I had come across in troubleshooting the original MySQL issue was that there was a command, mysql_upgrade that needed to be run to change how some tables are configured. I couldn’t do that before because I couldn’t even get MySQL to run. But I could get MariaDB to run at least for a bit, and had successfully gotten this upgrade command to run.

So I decided to, once again, try MySQL again, so I uninstalled MariaDB, and purged everything out, rebooting a few times to be sure. And MySQL would not even install anymore, so more purging, this time, including the Databases.

One thing I was glad I had decided to do, “Just in Case” when MariaDB was “working” was dump the databases out with backups. I was glad I did at this point. So with absolutely everything purged, MySQL installed and was working.

I set about recreating the databases from the dumps, and while I was at it updated all the passwords, since I had to recreate the user accounts used by WordPress anyway.

And now everything is working smoothly again.

A couple of links that were actually helpful in solving my problem.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67564215/problems-installing-mysql-on-ubuntu-20-04

https://learnubuntu.com/install-mysql/

Technology

Leaving Google, Part 2

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I discussed briefly last post, about what’s come up with my GSuite Legacy account. I wanted to mention a few other things that came up, and some additional steps I made. A lot of the other issues were pretty easy to correct. One extremely useful tool in all of this I found, was the Google Dashboard. This lists all of the services used with some generic metrics of how much might be there to look into.

For example, I found I had a few “Saved locations” in Google maps. They ended up being some inconsequential hotels from a trip years ago, but it was good to know so if they were something meaningful, I could resave them to my regular old Google Account.

There is also some useless and even slightly misleading information here. For example Google Cloud Print no longer exists, but it’s still listed. There doesn’t seem to be a way to purge out that data. Youtube lists “112 Purchases”, which isn’t true either, it’s “112 titles synced through my connected Vudu/Ultraviolet/MoviesAnywhere” access.” It’s not something I need to care about.

One, I had forgotten about was Contacts. I could have done a straight import/export, but I opted to take the long road and manually transfer everything to Outlook. This way I could also clean things up. This also meant I had to do some settings changes and shuffling on my phone, so it would use my Outlook Contacts instead of my Google contacts. I was, thankfully, already using Outlook as my email client anyway.

I also remembered that I used my domain account for my Google Analytics and Search Console credentials (Why aren’t these just one service?). Fortunately, these were fairly easily transferred to my standard Google Account. I found 4 services where I was able to do this, so I’ll roughly cover them all together.

Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Blogger, and Youtube, could all be directly transferred to a standard Gmail/Google account. The process is similar but slightly different on each.

Search Console allows you to delegate access to a secondary account. This account can then be made the primary owner, though to do this they need to be re-verified using DNS records.

Google Analytics is similar to Search Console, without the need to re-verify. I simply added my Gmail account as a user, promoted it to Admin, then deleted my domain account’s access.

Blogger worked the same way. I don’t really use Blogger, but I did have an empty blog with a name I’d like to hold on to, so I transferred it over.

Youtube is a bit more complex. Channels have to first be converted to “Brand Accounts”. Then you can delegate secondary users. Also, there is a waiting period of 7 days before a delegated user can be elevated to be the “Primary Owner”. After that period, I made my Gmail log in the Primary, and deleted access from my domain account. I had initially started simply consolidated playlists between accounts, but this was a pain in the ass. Going with the Brand account method, I was able to transfer everything. I BELEIVE, but am not positive, that there may be a way to convert the channels back to personal accounts, but I’m not positive on that one.

I’m am nearly ready to see what steps I need to take to cancel out the Gsuite part of the domain account, which HOPEFULLY will convert it to a Web ID. The only thing left is my Google Play apps. It’s not cleat at all what will happen here. If it converts to a Web ID, the Play Purchases should just continue to be used and licensed to that account. I have documented everything I’ve every bought, free or not, in case I need to “re-purchase” anything I use or care about (free or not) on my Gmail Account. I still plan to use the Gmail account going forward. I do also need to figure out how to transfer my Pokemon Home subscription to my Gmail account.

The whole process has gone surprisingly smoothly, it’s just been time consuming. It helped a lot that frankly, I wasn’t really using many Google Services anymore to start with. The reality is, that consolidating all my email to one (Microsoft) account has been great, because I can better use Rules to manage it before it’s shuffled off to the archive ball on my NAS.

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