Fail of your Boo-Yah (and vica-versa)

  1. I am having too many expenses lately.
  2. I do want to reconstruct my data right now, but I’m not 100% sure that the NAS will actually successfully do that. I’m not even 100% sure it’s the drive that is busted. Seems just as likely its the NAS itself. Once I get the new PC working I may have a spare drive I can stick in there.
  3. Old NAS takes 2TB disks. I don’t want to put such a tiny disk in a new NAS.
  4. I do not believe the crappy old ReadyNAS NV+ can have its OS replaced. I mean, it’s probably possible to put linux on there, as it is possible to put it on anything, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get a lot of help or support.

Buy a bigger disk, even though it will only use 2 TB of it right now in the reconstruction. Repurpose it later.

2TB is the biggest drive this old NAS supports. It will not work with a larger one.

I’ve seen this with older USB disk controllers but never SATA. Also, older computers might not boot off a disk bigger than 2 TB, but I’ve not seen this for non-boot drives, again over SATA.

I can’t tell you it’ll work. But I’d still try it and if it doesn’t work, make sure you’ve picked a disk big enough that you can copy the entirety of the NAS over onto it (while degraded—it’s a risk) and then use it to bootstrap the new NAS.

Or to minimize risk, get a 2 TB disk for right now while you plan for the replacement NAS. (I use my older, smaller, former RAID disks for off-site backups.)

I’m just going to copy the old nas to a new nas and then the new nas has cloud support.

I suppose a perk of me being boring and not making things is that every file on my PC is either backed up in Google Drive or replaceable. All the important stuff is small and fits in the cloud, and all the big files are video, audio, and games that can be re-downloaded.

If you’re so worried, just copy the whole NAS to an external drive. it ain’t that much space. What, 4TB of data tops?

Good news: I just got around to transferring the drives from my old desktop to the new desktop. Apparently I was mistaken about the size of those drives. There was a 4TB and 2x 2TB in there.

One of those 2TB drives only contained Program Files that would not fit onto the 256MB SSD in the previous PC. Therefore, it was safe to format. I formatted it and stuck it into the NAS while it was running. The NAS appears to be syncing disk 2! I think it’s working. The NAS is still accessible while it is doing this. Things are looking good, but nothing is certain until it is done and sends me an email.

Good/bad news: I took that supposedly crashed drive out of the NAS and connected it to the new PC. Was it really crashed? Could I perhaps format it? NOPE. It’s SUPER crashed. The new PC would not even POST while that drive was attached to an SATA port. As soon as I removed the drive, the new PC booted instantly.

Problem: How can I use dban on this drive before I dispose of it? I guess I just have to trust that nobody can get any valuable data from it since it was in a striped RAID?

Good news: I confirmed the M.2 is in PCIX mode.

Bad news: I already ordered that new NAS and 4x 4TB drives. I should and could just return them, but the temptation to not do so is great, especially since I still don’t trust this old NAS as much as I perhaps should.

Good news: This old NAS is still working, so I can probably sell it after erasing all the disks.

Good news; I attached all my old drives to the new PC, and they are great.

Would it be possible to drop it into a toaster or a USB drive enclosure and blank it that way? If not, and you still want to destroy it, I guess your only options left are to swiss cheese it with a drill, or open it up and cook the fuck out of the platters with a torch to demagnetize it.

There’s a fascinating DEFCon panel exclusively about the destruction of harddrives (in his case in under 1 minute) It’s good and involves thermite, really really large amounts of electricity and explosives (spoilers, thermite and electricity = innefective, explosives = effective)

I’ve seen both of them, it’s pretty good!

Heh, I’ve only seen the second and am only aware of the first because it’s brought up in the second. I’m a big fan of Zoz and have seen every one of his talks. He’s somewhere between someone who I’m extremely jealous of and someone who I have a crush on. It’s a weird relationship.

The first one is hilarious, at one point they’re talking about initiating an explosive device in a server cab in the only legal way possible, which is having a loaded, cocked firearm pointed at the charge. One of my favorite lines - “We’ve already transitioned away from IDE drives, we don’t want to transition to IED drives.”

That… That’s a pretty good line. I’ll have to go give it a watch.

Here, let me help, I found it on youtube -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M73USsXHdc

Also, it is more than a little amusing hearing tales of people who are far more expert than me in realms I don’t even know exist, learning things I learned when I was still in short pants. After all, a lot of work in the workshop is really just the controlled destruction of certain amounts of things, in certain places.

Boo-yah: I’m seeing Balck Pistol Fire
Fail: I couldn’t sleep the night before the show.

Fail: I must have sat down wrong, because my hip was incredibly painful for two days, to the point where I had trouble moving or even sleeping.

Boo-Yah: While in the shower, I had my leg propped up on the shelf to wash my foot, and when I brought it back down, I heard a pop in my hip and suddenly the pain went away entirely.

I wouldn’t. Parity blocks should be fairly safe assuming your data is approximately random, but it probably has a bunch of data blocks that can be read without issue.

Update: I had several panic attacks trying to put on make up and went to sleep instead.

Boo yah - pax East flights booked and hotel room(s) should be in order

Fail - according to a friend of mine none of my panels got approved, thankfully enforcing will get me the badge