In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2) by SIGNYM

Out in a bit on a confused weather day. Sun is out but around clouds. Will take umbrella in case and wear my jacket. Stupid weather.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 3:49 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Still going as full-on as I can manage.

SIX, your decluttering is a thing of awesomeness!

I hope to follow your example.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 4:32 PM

Hehe...

It doesn't feel awesome while I'm doing it. To pack up all the trash and get it outside would have only taken me 20 minutes, but the whole round took two very long days.

It's really nice having all that crap up off the floor and most of it outside staged for trash pickup now.

Maybe I'll get a little painting done today. I dunno though. Been running around here like a chicken with its head cut off for a few days and it's dark and gloomy outside.

I might just mess around on the computer today. Initial backup tests were a failure. After spending a few days moving things and trying to set up a 2nd computer with everything backed up brick-by-brick isn't going to work because of 2 external forces I wasn't aware of until I tried doing it that way.

I've managed to clear off a 500GB hard drive for a cloning procedure which is about 90% done with the 2nd verification step.

Assuming that works as planned, I need to then make some adjustments that I was afraid of messing with when I only had one working system. Once that's done, I'm going to be creating a disk image to clone other drives with, and I should get the result I'm looking for. I'm also in the process of cleaning a 2nd 500GB hard drive for a 3rd test when all of that is done.

ETA: The good news is that even done the wrong way, a majority of my stuff works. I'm also able to make great use of a computer my dad gave me to throw away a few years ago. I'd never seen such a bargain-bin DELL computer before. I knew it was a low-end mini-tower and I wasn't expecting much inside, but I was shocked when I saw the laptop-style plug to it with just a little nobby that goes into the back. This thing is so low power it doesn't even need a power supply.

That thing turned out to be a great way to test this stuff out. It was damn near worthless if you were trying to run Windows on it even back in 2024 or whenever I got it, but it flies with Linux installed. It's still too low-powered to really do much with my stuff, but it will give me valuable data for testing and should aid in the cloning process until I have the final image.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 5:29 PM

Heh....

This is where the limitations of my outdated tech really begin to show themselves.

There are more than a few.

I forgot I had a lot of things pointing to my stupid-huge hard drive when it got to be too much data for these little 500GB drives I've been working with, so I kind of spooked myself with the initial results after the clone until I remembered that.

If I had a few spare 1TB drives and everything here was USB3.0, I'd be getting all of this done so much quicker. Now I get to see over the network what went wrong this time. At least network navigation shouldn't be slower than usual while I'm doing it.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 5:58 PM

All outside stuff done for today and I really didn't need my jacket and I sure didn't need my umbrella.

Got some papers put away that weren't order. Straightened them out but still more to deal with.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 6:35 PM

Man... Symlinks are tricky. (Linux's "System Links", the otherwise vastly superior alternative to Windows shortcuts).

I actually had quite a few more in there by the time I was finished than I thought I'd added. They have become a problem during the clone process, but I just finally figured out not nearly as big of an issue as I feared until only about 5 minutes ago.

The thing is, they're COMPLETELY invisible to end users in Windows. Even when using WinSCP or another FTP program. It's as if they simply don't exist at all.

So what's the problem?

Well... I need those folder locations. A ton of data is built around specific media and data being in very specific folders. So when I try to copy over either legit files, or 0kb dummy files with the full name and extention as placeholders for the huge files on small drives, I don't like seeing Windows give some generic error about the files that I'm trying to copy no longer existing on the drive that I'm trying to copy them from.

Now that I know what's actually going on, I don't believe that is what it was saying, but you can tell that I'm way far enough down the rabbit hole that the people at Windows didn't bother putting the Dummy Gloss over the weeds that nobody but me is likely to get themselves tangled up in.

I finally broke down and had a look at it from the Linux side and yep... There they are. In every place where I'm missing data, it's because I was using Symlinks to the stupid-huge drive for big stuff.

And even though Symlinks are completely invisible in Windows, they're still very much there. Broken Symlinks that point to a huge hard drive that doesn't even exist on this new computer, sharing the exact same name as the folders I need to make.

So I just have to find all of them now and delete them before putting the actual bits I need there for the "Torso".

As frustrating as all this is, I'm really glad I'm doing all of it.

Because of my old tech, my cheap data plan and no ability to maintain a server on my end, things are going to have to go out peacemeal. I already knew that and I've planned ahead for it. The idea is to have everything modular and extremely easy to fit together on the other end.

Like Voltron.

But when all you've left yourself is male ends on everything, nothing joins up.

Oopsie.

At least I figured it out. After the first method of trying to do this failed, I kind of put all my eggs in this cloning basket because I don't have a 3rd idea.

Everything else appears to be fine so far, if not a little slow on this ancient piece of tech (from 2014, I just discovered). Hopefully I'll get to the point where I'm making the final clone image before crashing out.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 9:15 PM

Yuck....

Just finished getting some 20 year old soda sugar off my fingers and then I get a good dose of battery acid on them.

I found 4 wireless game joystics in my attic I only vaguely remember buying back when I was at my last good job. Probably stopped using them only because they take AA batteries and aren't rechargable. I was amazed after all these years how well the first one I tried worked, and how easily the system recognized it. I didn't have to dig online for drivers or anything, which was pretty surprising to me considering it's wireless.

Then I tried the 2nd one and the buttons felt like they were glued together with honey. I managed to take it apart and clean it up and put it all back together without breaking anything and now I've got two that work like new without any failed buttons. Sticky all over on the inside. I don't think the fact that the area around the 4 buttons was concave and was basically just a bowl to hold liquid spilled on it until it had time to get inside the controller helped here.

I was drinking pretty heavy back then so I don't want to blame it on my brother, but that doesn't seem like something I would have done.

Leaving batteries in them is though. I opened up the 3rd controller and the Rayovacs insdie exploded all over the place to the point that it was just falling out and onto the floor. Lucky for me, the Duracells I had in the one in the first pair that didn't need cleaning were still intact. You get what you pay for.

I have to test out the other of the two seemingly identical USB recievers and see if it works with this pair. The two sets of controllers are very different, but both of the recievers appear to be exactly the same. I thought maybe they both worked on all 4 controllers, but maybe I just won the initial coin toss and I was using the right reciever for the right pair the first time around.

If I can't get the one that doesn't have battery acid all over it to work, I'm just going to throw both of them out and that will be an easy decision. But if it works, I'm probably going to spend some time tomorrow in the daylight trying to revive the other one.

These things are actually really high quality besides the fact you need batteries for them. I wasn't such a cheapskate back then, so that makes sense. If I can get all these working I'll have 2 backups, but in the meantime it's 2 less cords to trip over in the living room. I've got a nice set of rechargable duracells with 8 AA batteries too, so if I actually wanted to use these things it shouldn't be a big deal.

Nice.

Maybe I'll go through those Kindles tonight too and see which ones I'm going to keep and which I'm going to give away. I don't think I feel like messing with the Fire Sticks right now though. I have a feeling that just testing those out is going to be a PITA.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 10:47 PM

Cool. I won't feel guilty about not cleaning out all that battery acid.

I vaguely remembered having wireless Playstation 2 controllers around that point, and these are those (they??? them???)...

That being said, I don't even know where my old PS2 is packed up right now and the receiver dongles might be packed in with that since I double checked and they were not with these controllers. That means that even though these controllers are capable of working on any PC, you can't actually connect them to a PC without an adapter that may or may not exist or some heavy physical modifications I'm not going to be doing.

And I haven't played the PS2 in so long I don't even remember having it unpacked since I've lived here, so it's not like I'm in desperate need of a controller for it where I'd spend hours trying to clean the acid off of it without even being able to test that I fixed it. No thanks. Just more trash is all...

Oh, and I found a DVD player in that crappy old computer that I could remove without leaving a gaping hole in the face plate since the computer had a door for it that stays closed unless the drive pushes it open, so now that thing is super lightweight.

Technically not really junk out of my house though since I plan on giving this thing away anyhow. It will never have need of that drive again, so I just removed it and tossed it out.

Maybe I'll try to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. I don't know. I've got a few more hours of actual hand-on work prepping that drive for what will hopefully be my final image, but after that it's just waiting around and I'm running out of other things I'd want to be doing when it's dark outside. I think all I really have is sorting through those kindles and fire sticks on the side at the moment, unless I want to go down in the cold basement and do some more painting.

I dunno... See where the night takes me I guess.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 10:55 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Hehe...

It doesn't feel awesome while I'm doing it. To pack up all the trash and get it outside would have only taken me 20 minutes, but the whole round took two very long days.

Is that all???

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 11:00 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
All outside stuff done for today and I really didn't need my jacket and I sure didn't need my umbrella.

Got some papers put away that weren't order. Straightened them out but still more to deal with.

Oh. Paperwork. I hate it. (And yet, curiously, that's what my last job was. I have much rather been wrenching on an instrument.)

I'm planning on doing that when the weather gets too hot for yardwork.
Or, whenever.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Tuesday, May 12, 2026 11:39 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Not a Linux whiz like hubby. My workplace was a Microsoftshop, so a lot of what you posted went by me. But I felt your pain about broken linkies!

My group had a portion of a server, and that's where we stored our data and did our calculations and checked each other's work (we also kept final signed hard copies for the legal beagles). Some of our final reports required input from six or seven different chemists/ instruments, and we had to be able to backtrack from final report all the way thru each analysis to original sample and calibration data. We NEVER EVER used links, bc they were so easily broken! It took a very disciplined system of directories, subdirectories, and filenames to unambiguously and uniquely name each file in a backtrackable fashion. I think it would have been easier in Linux.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 12:01 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
All outside stuff done for today and I really didn't need my jacket and I sure didn't need my umbrella.

Got some papers put away that weren't order. Straightened them out but still more to deal with.

Oh. Paperwork. I hate it. (And yet, curiously, that's what my last job was. I have much rather been wrenching on an instrument.)

I'm planning on doing that when the weather gets too hot for yardwork.
Or, whenever.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

Yeah, stuff that got mashed together and I have just now been able to straighten out. Which is good.

May get to more tomorrow. Shall see what I feel like doing.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 12:04 AM

Had a bit of thunder and lighting storm around me at supper. No rain but I did see between 3 or 4 flashes of lighting but not much thunder.

Really have to replace the batteries in my bedside radio. Was going to last night and forgot.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 12:15 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

The weather was PERFECT for yardwork!

So after I got done with family tasks, I headed out with my reciprocating saw, loppers, and pruners.

I know I really should have finished cutting down the rest of the palms, but I wanted to do a little bit more rosebush cleanup, and I just couldn't stop.
I'm sure you know how that goes, SIX!

Well. I ALMOST got thru clipping and yanking a lot of dead crap out, but then I had to take dog for her walk. Just a little more to go! And then I have to decide: do I rake, chop and bin up? Or continue with the palms?

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 12:43 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Hehe...

It doesn't feel awesome while I'm doing it. To pack up all the trash and get it outside would have only taken me 20 minutes, but the whole round took two very long days.
Is that all???

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger

Oh... we could stretch it through the whole summer if we wanted to, I'm sure. Especially if we get the garage back in the mix.

I'm trying to behave myself though. I already avoided working on the house for about 2 years with one project. Don't need to totally derail it with another one now.

There was just a lot of things that I was finally able to get rid of that made this worthwhile. I haven't built a PC in over 10 years, and chances are a lot of the stuff I had which was already aging back then wouldn't even be used in building a PC today if I did, so why am I holding on to all of it?

Just keep one or two decent cables of each type and a huge box becomes an afterthought.

And it's nice finally getting down to business with all of this tech that I've accepted when other people were getting rid of stuff. Your best intentions are nothing but a big mess until you do something with them.

SPeaking of which... I have a very big stash of what is now ancient tech but wasn't when I first moved here that I intended on making things to gift to other people. I probably could have gotten away with that 7 years ago when I dehoarded and kept them, but they stayed up there another 7 years and meanwhile tech has really moved on and it would be much easier to make similar things that just worked better, took up less shelf space, and used a lot less power, without spending all that much money.

That's probably another 5 or 6 huge boxes I can get rid of once I go through it all. I'm going to keep a couple of those for myself when I figure out what still even works and what doesn't, and get rid of all the rest of it.

I think between that, what I've already done, and getting the 3 or so boxes of speakers out the the garage with the Denon reciever for my jams, I will have already gotten rid of or made use of half of the things I was still holding onto up here.

The only reason I don't feel guilty about doing this dehoarding while I'm working on the computer right now is because of how unseasonably cold it still is around here. But I've got more pressing issues to work on than this. I can go through a bag of clothes every day or two while working on other stuff, but I can't keep making every day a dehoard focus.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 12:59 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Not a Linux whiz like hubby. My workplace was a Microsoftshop, so a lot of what you posted went by me. But I felt your pain about broken linkies!

I'm sure you've run into a broken shortcut for one reason or another before. It's either annoying because your program is borked or because when you removed a program it didn't clean up after itself.

We tend to take for granted how great shortcuts are, but in Linux those Symbolic Links are just Next Level.

Let's say I have a folder on a large remote drive that has over 1 Terrabyte of data that is too huge to be on the main system drive but you want to use it as if it were all on a single drive. All you have to do is create a Symbolic Link where you want the folder to be found and point it to where the folder actually is. Once you've done this, for all intents and purposes it behaves exactly as if that 1TB folder and all of its sub-folders are right there on the Main Drive. This holds true even if you're using an FTP program to get into it from a computer running Windows. As far as Windows and the FTP program are concerned, that is all one big drive and that 1TB folder is just a part of it.

But then you clone a drive which is located on a different computer without that massive hard drive where all the Symbolic Links were pointing and you've got a problem. If you FTP into it from the Windows computer, none of it is there anymore at all. And you don't see the Symlink either. But if you try to create a new folder with the name of the folder that the Symlink is pointing to, Windows throws some weird errors (either about the file already being there, or the file no longer existing from the place you're trying to copy from). You can't delete the Symlink from Windows/FTP because Windows doesn't even acknowledge that it exists.

When I saw the pattern where it was happening, it dawned on me what the problem was and sure enough in every spot where this problem was happening it's because I had a symbolic link pointing to that big drive.

I'm actually really glad that this annoying thing happened. I didn't exactly plan on getting a crash course from myself about how to set up my thing from scratch. I didn't exactly assume it was going to just work without any problems either. Just doing things the way I was doing them to get it ready to work on other machines necessitated it and here we are. And if I hadn't started the dehoarding both online and off, I wouldn't have remembered I had this ancient computer to kick all the code around with as if I were somebody else setting it all up with what they were given. I wouldn't have finally rotated drives around to the point where I've got two 500GB and two 256GB external drives I didn't have a few weeks ago around to help me move all sorts of stuff around physically when I'm already maxing out the wifi. (I literally just finished pulling out an additional 500GB SSD that I was wasting away inside of a computer backing up something that doesn't even need to be backed up that can now be a high speed external boot operating system or whatever I want to make with it after I'm done with the digital dehoarding).

Now what I have to do with the project is fix all of the bad Symlinks and make sure that all the modular parts will fit together when they're acquired on the other end. People can either make up their mind to use one very large drive, or they can create their own symbolic links if they don't. That's out of my hands. But I want everything to be plug 'n play before people start forking off and doing their own thing.

Quote:
My group had a portion of a server, and that's where we stored our data and did our calculations and checked each other's work (we also kept final signed hard copies for the legal beagles). Some of our final reports required input from six or seven different chemists/ instruments, and we had to be able to backtrack from final report all the way thru each analysis to original sample and calibration data. We NEVER EVER used links, bc they were so easily broken! It took a very disciplined system of directories, subdirectories, and filenames to unambiguously and uniquely name each file in a backtrackable fashion. I think it would have been easier in Linux.

It was probably a chore for all of you, but that type of work sounds right up my alley.

I hear ya on the links. I'm living it right now.

I simply had to use them because of my situation, but they waited until the very end to rear their ugly little heads on me.

They almost got away with it too...

Almost.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 1:59 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Had a bit of thunder and lighting storm around me at supper. No rain but I did see between 3 or 4 flashes of lighting but not much thunder.

Really have to replace the batteries in my bedside radio. Was going to last night and forgot.

Are the batteries in there to make sure the alarm still works in a power outage, or do you listen to the radio while using batteries, Brenda?

That sounds quite expensive.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 4:07 AM

I always underestimate how long things are going to take. Just finally got to backing up that (hopefully) final image now.

I've got some other images I will be making later, but those are just for me and my preferences, now that I'll finally be able to use it at my leisure and break off from the neutral state.

Didn't even look at those Kindles yet... Probably not a bad idea to have two days go by after charging to see if any of them lost the charge real quick anyhow.

I think I've got to get back to doing at least a little painting tomorrow. Except for disposal, the curio cabinet and the part of the dehoard I was doing is all cleaned up and finished. I'm pretty sure anything I'll be doing on the computer in the next few days now will mostly be setting things to run that don't need babysitting, and just being aware of the passage of time so I don't lose hours that could have been spent moving things along.

I'm sure I can at least prime the back side of all the pieces I did the other day. Maybe paint that cabinet trim to match the vanity and get it ready for measurements and cuts. That's got to be the first thing done so I can put a final coat of paint on the inside and get the drawer slides back up and ready for when the drawers are finished. I probably won't put a final coat on the outside of the vanity until I'm done painting the ceiling and the walls.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 5:34 AM

I got one process running on one rig that will probably take 12 hours and another on a 2nd rig that will be busy for days. It's unfortunate that I can't start 2 others that I still have the resources available for, but both of those things can't be done until the first one is done, and that first one has a 2nd part that will take at least a few more hours once the 12 hour part is done. I think I know a way to move some things around where I can at least get started on the first of the two other processes when part 1 is done.

Most things I do don't require any hardware all that powerful, but it's times like these where I really feel how old my tech is. Not that any of this would be lightning fast if I had top shelf new stuff, but instead of talking hours and days we'd only be talking minutes and hours. Oh well... Everything's Eventual. What's a few days when I've already spent all this time on it?

Yup...

Going to have to find something else to do with all that downtime. I don't imagine I'll have to look very far.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 1:24 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Had a bit of thunder and lighting storm around me at supper. No rain but I did see between 3 or 4 flashes of lighting but not much thunder.

Really have to replace the batteries in my bedside radio. Was going to last night and forgot.

Are the batteries in there to make sure the alarm still works in a power outage, or do you listen to the radio while using batteries, Brenda?

That sounds quite expensive.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Batteries are in but I just use the radio to listen to music. I have no alarm clocks around me anymore. I usually wake up early and look at the clock to see if I can catch a little more sleep. Also I have to other clocks that are battery powered in case of an outage. Also this building has a generator that kicks in case of outages.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 1:24 PM

Out in a bit bottle recycling to do. Need umbrella for sure looking at the sky and jacket.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 3:13 PM

Damn man... Let that process run overnight, saw it was finished when I woke up, and now I can't do anything with it. It's just a 512GB block of unusable crap. It was from a bootable drive, but the programs I'm looking to write it back to a new disk warn me there is no boot sector in the image.

Part of me thinks the file is actually good, but Windows is getting all screwed up since there are Linux partitions on it too. I think it might be possible to convert this image to a another format and I might have more luck, but the amount of time it would take to learn how to do that and then test it only to see it fail isn't worth trying. I've got to just try a different ripping program. I don't even want to take the time to try and write this image to another disk since I can't find anybody online telling me what's going on in my particular situation.

I vaguely remember having this issue a long while back, but I was only messing with 32GB thumb sticks at the time. If something failed, I knew about in 30 minutes, not 12 hours. It's kind of hard to do my preferred method of trial and error with that much downtime between attempts.

I had no problem creating a complete clone of a hard drive the other night. That worked perfectly. If I had just one more 500GB drive I could be working on other things while I was doing this, but I can't do anything until this image is made and tested out.

Says it's going to be about another 12 hours now, so I guess I should find something else to do.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 5:13 PM

Back and done. Got spat on a little bit and the sun is out now.

I hate blip seizures. Those are the ones when I am only gone for a second or so but it is enough time to screw things up in a post. Happened this morning on Face Book.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2026 5:57 PM