This is a follow-up of my last rant: https://devrant.com/rants/1323422/...

TLDR; My step-son tripped over my HDD power cord, sending it plummeting towards certain death.

So this is just over a year ago. At this point, my GF and I are married, and she's about 7 months pregnant with our daughter. Her son, Nicolas - the one from the last rant - is 13 years old.

So it was a Saturday, and I had Nicolas helping me to clean up the apartment. My wife was off the hook, because, ya know - she's pregnant.

While I was cleaning the living room, I had Nic cleaning the kitchen/dining room area. At this same time, I had my laptop and a 3Tb external USB hard drive on the dining room table, copying a bunch of data or something. This external HDD also had it's own power cord, which was plugged in next to the table.

Next thing I know, I hear an "Ohp!" followed by a crash. It was the horrifying sound of my hard drive plunging 36 inches off the table towards certain death. And death, it had.

Before even checking, I knew this HDD was dead. It took a lot for me not to snap at the kid. I told him to get out of the kitchen and go clean his room. That hard drive... hadn't been backed up. At all, which is on me. Even more so, since that data was really irreplaceable.

Even knowing that the HDD HAD to be dead, I still plugged it in, hoping for a miracle. I got nothing, it wouldn't even spin up.

$ dmesg -w

Showed that linux saw the USB controller and even the HDD controller (it printed out the manufacturer, SeaGate). The data was valuable enough that I was saving up some money to have the data recovered, which would be about $2,000.

However, before I had saved up enough money... My apartment was broken into and all my external HDD's (and some internal ones I had laying around) were stolen.

Small update to this rant
https://devrant.com/rants/1789703/... :

A classmate of mine lend me his old laptop with an SSD and an HDD and I could install Ubuntu Budgie on it and use it while my laptop is under repairment. The thing is, this temporary laptop is pretty awesome and fast and the fact that I don't have to deal with all the NVidia proprietary drivers and other gaming laptop bs makes me pretty happy

Update to the story above: the HDD of the temporary laptop died (didn't have anything important on it, so no problem). But I must be going through some bad omen tech times, since, beside my laptop and this HDD dying, my cooking plate, inflatable mattress, some sockets and lightbulbs broke inside my apartment. Hail!

To make my new desktop "sweat"

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8 GB Intel i7-8700 (3.20 GHz) 6-Core 16 GB DDR4 240 GB SSD 1 TB HDD
https://newegg.com/Product/...

https://devrant.com/rants/1890595/...

The ridiculous and shameful story of how simply "installing Windows" saved my hard drive from the garbage.
(Also update on https://devrant.com/rants/3105365/)

It started with my root partition turning read-only all of a sudden. Some quick search suggested that I should check the sanity of my hard drive, by running a SMART test, which failed of course. I backed up my data using ddrescue and ran a badblocks over the whole thing, which found around 800 unreadable blocks in a row. I was ready to bid farewell to my drive, but as a last resort, instead of the trash, I brought it to this place where they claimed they can repair the damaged hard drives by "surgery".

To my surprise, they returned my drive the next week, saying it is all well now, and charged me 1/8 the price of a new drive, with a refund guarantee if there was a problem in two days. There was a problem right there: I ran another SMART test which failed again, and also the faulty blocks were still unreadable! So I stormed the place and called for my refund, showing the failed SMART report. The only answer I would get from the staff was "Have you tried installing Windows?".

I usually try to be patient in such situations; I really don't like to declare publicly that "not everyone uses that stinky piece of rotten software you call an OS", but their suggestion seemed totally irrelevant! I got all types of IO errors all over the damn thing and they told me to install Windows. Why? Because this was the only test they would rely on. At last I managed to meet the "technician" there and showed him the IO errors: tried to read the bad sectors with dd and failed. He first mumbled somethings like "Have you checked the connector?" or "Are these the same blocks?", but after he ran out of bullshit, he said "Why don't you just install Windows first and see if that helps?" and I was ready to explode in his face!

"You test drives by installing Windows, just because it will make a nasty NTFS partition and probably does an fsck? If you shut your mouth for a sec and open your eyes you'll see this is a shit load of IO errors we got here: You can't install Windows, you can't even make an NTFS here, because it will try to zero-the-fuck-out the damn partition and it will face the same fucking IO error that I'm showing you right now in almost one single fucking system call!"

"I don't know this kind of test you are using. We have our own tests and they've passed successfully. So all I can do is to give you a Windows CD if you want."

"I don't need a Windows CD. I will just try to make an NTFS partition on the error spot and I will fail."

"Ok. Then call me when your done."

I was angry, not only because I felt they're just trying to avoid a refund, but also because I knew I've lost my drive. But just with hope that I could get my money back, I made a small partition over the error spot and ran `mkfs.ntfs` on it. I was ready to show the failure to the guy, but I looked more precisely and saw that "the filesystem was created successfully!" I was sure something is nor write. I then successfully mounted the new partition, write over it and read it again. I even dd'ed the blocks again, and this time there was no IO error. All of a sudden everything was fine.

I didn't know what happened. Maybe it just needed a write, while I'd just tried to read from those blocks. But anyway, I didn't called the technician guy again. I just thanked one of the staff there and said that my problem was solved. I then ran a successful SMART test and then restored my backup. Ridiculous like that.

I'm still not sure if my drive will continue to live with no more problems. I also have no explanation for what happened. (I appreciate any help on this https://superuser.com/questions/...) But I really like to see the look on the poor guy's face when he finds out that trying to install Windows just saved my ass!

Discovered this dumb backdoor into http://tutorialspoint.com/codinggro... months ago (June 2019). It's in Project>Compilation Options

It lets you execute any command on their server. I found a lot out:

The system is Red Hat based (Fedora/CentOS/RHEL)
It uses Linux kernel 3.20
It has 251GB of RAM
It has an 800GB HDD
Its IP is 172.17.0.2
Its main username is cg
It uses systemd init