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As usual, Merc, you're right. I thought there was some kind of invisible system file hogging all the space but it was just various bits of image and audio data that I'd been neglecting to clear out. Whatsapp media made up the bulk of it. Another contributing factor was my Google One account...

There's no easy correlation I can establish between that green block and any particular piece of software.

Today my Pixel 4a started throwing warnings about low storage space. This seemed unusual because my usage is pretty consistent and I tend to stay on top of clearing out old files. But as you can see from the green rectangle in the DiskUsage screenshot, there's are 56.3 GB of data unaccounted...

Okay, on second glance I have definitely seen Roblox in passing, here and there. I don't know if it's possible or practical to try and sanitize online spaces. It'd certainly be a hell of an undertaking. I think it's wise for parents to heavily moderate the online activities of their younger...

...aaaaand I don't even know what that is. Guess I must be old.

My sister is trying to maintain control over her kids' internet time. When all devices used a single MAC address it was fairly simple to block an individual device on the fly. But now that all phones have inbuilt MAC address spoofing, managing access has become a lot trickier. I've proposed...

Yeah, so I tried in Ubuntu using the Disks control panel and while it didn't error out like IMGburn in Windows, it basically returned a long string of unreadable errors. The disc reads fine in Windows. I'm going to get a new (secondhand) drive and try again.

Oh, cool. I hadn't heard of this before. I guess that's what happens when your interests shift away from gaming for a couple of decades. 😂

Truth is I'm entirely disinterested in ripping and burning Blu-Ray discs. I just want to play my old games without needing the disc in the drive, or even a drive.

Oh, right, MakeMKV forums. Got it.

How about the Asus BC-12B1ST? Someone's selling one near me for CAD$50

Oh, great. Another forum rabbit hole. Thanks a LOT. 😂

I've actually never owned a BluRay drive or disc.

How old are we talking? Any models in particular to put on my watch list?

Ah, good idea.

If not then it might just be these old drives and I'll pick up a new one. Any recommendations for a bullet-proof optical drive that'll read just about anything? I remember some LG and Lite-On models were really good back in the day, as was a Plextor I had, but that was a long time ago.

Is it possible that some of my old game CDs (Ultima IX, Unreal Tournament) have some kind of protection that allows them to be read but not ripped to disk images? I've tried imaging them from two different optical drives using both Daemon Tools Lite and IMGBurn but am getting errors. Other CDs...

I dunno if I'd use flash for long-term mass storage. I mean, how recoverable are these drives? With spinning rust I know there are pretty good odds of recovery. Also, how much is 8TB of flash? A lot more than 8TB of HDD, I'm guessing.

Yeah, I don't know why I typed 3.5". The drive with the integrated USB board was one of those 2.5" portables. I think I ended up soldering leads directly to it. It was a long time ago. What do you use?

As I'm typing this the new drive blinks off and back on again, completely at random. Maybe I'll use the new power adapter after all...

Yeah, I've encountered those. 500GB 3.5" spinners From WD, if memory serves, with a damaged USB 3 Micro B connector (worst connector ever?). I thought I could pop the drive out and pop it into an enclosure but nope!

Ah, were they all from a particular brand? I tested the power adapter and it appears to be working. I left it in place and it's currently powering the replacement enclosure.

On a side note I really like the GDrive enclosure and wish I could salvage it but the board has like 30 components, many of them ICs and is probably beyond my skills as a repair technician. None of the capacitors look swollen and that's about as far as I'm willing to investigate. 😁

Recently one of my backup drives—an out-of-warranty 6TB G-Tech which I purchased in 2017—started throwing critical filesystem errors whenever it was in use. I'd have to CHKDSK it nearly every time I switched it on and soon it started corrupting data so I bought some components to replace it (a...

Ahh, got it.

Case in point. Yes, a hypothetical, code-literate variant of me could do that. 😁 Yes, that was accurately reported in Windows, but where are you seeing total written/data unit count?

Ah, no, as a matter of fact I didn't! Rather silly of me. And there you have it. Clearly the drive makes the data available for anyone who knows how to access it.

This all started when I asked a seller on Kijiji to post a screenshot of the TBW of a Western Digital SSD. I figured it would be right there in the overview page or the SMART data. Nope. I guess the cryptic health score is fine, but it's puzzling (and a little irritating) that WD would obscure...

Today—on a whim—I checked one of my NVMe drives (WD Blue 1TB) to see how it was wearing. The WD Dashboard app doesn't show TBW but it reports SMART data. The value it shows is "3340658 Data Units Written", which I took to mean "Total LBA written". The problem with 3,340,658 x 512 LBA sectors...

No specific goals, here, just curious because it's in my nature to wonder about rescue tools.

Eight months on and I've realized that I neglected to report back on how I got Steam to run as admin. The solution—after some trial and error—was to create a shortcut and in the target to type: C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /user:DESKTOP-UFI6199\Administrator /savecred "C:\Program Files...

I wiped. I reloaded. (y) Who has time to chase these problems down? Not I. I thought it was beguiling enough a circumstance to share so I documented it.

I also tried booting into a command prompt from the Windows 10 installer and running sfc /scannow, chkdsk and bootrec with various switches. No love. I checked the disk partitions using diskpart and things looked pretty messed up so I think it's time for the nuclear option.

In-ter-est-ing!

My nephew got a MAR-refurbished T480s which came factory-reset and already logged into Windows. While I was setting it up I absent-mindedly performed the following actions in User Managment console in this order: 1. Added a password to the default Administrator account. Hit Apply 2. Renamed the...

Crystal Disk Info reports a figure. Different than the figure reported by SMART but close enough.

I found a S.M.A.R.T. parameter called Data Units Written. According a document by Kingston this reports the number of 512B sectors written, not including metadata.

WD Dashboard doesn't report TBW anywhere that I can see. Is there another utility that can report this?

It seems as though the _runas_ shortcut I set up is requesting an admin password.

I set my nephews up with User accounts on their bedroom computers. This is fine for the most part but once a week or so Fortnite tries to update. This requires admin privileges and hence adult/Admin involvement. I've tried creating a Fortnite shortcut using 'runas' but this apparently hasn't...

The previous configuration involved a DSL modem in the garage and there was no cable running between the office and garage so it's hard to compare. Anyway, right now we're using the Mercku as the primary router, which kind of sucks because the firmware is very basic but it also hasn't dropped...

I suppose there could also be a hardware issue with the TP-Link. I swapped it for the D-Link running DD-WRT. So far (9 hours) no dropouts.

My Hitron CDA-35 cable modem (available only through ISPs; purchased from Rogers) reports a WAN and gateway IP addresses that bear no resemblance to my public IP. The modem's IP addresses are in the public address space; why would the ISP give me one IP to connect to them and then another to...

My internet's been going out daily since I configured the network as in the image below, and I'm darn near my wits' end trying to figure out what's going on. The outages come once or twice a day, without out apparent rhyme or reason or correlation to any of my activities. When an outage occurs...

Yeah, I remember that 100% fan thing from a decade ago. It was pretty hilar back then as a non-Mac-PC user. This is the first I've heard of an embedded whitelist, however. I had always heard that it was the presence of a thermal sensor that made the difference. I downloaded an app called Macs...

For the record, my intention is to use the SSD for the OS and apps, while retaining the HDD for storage / fan noise mitigation.

I posted this earlier today on the MacRumors forum. --- This morning I followed OWC's tutorial video and installed an old Samsung EVO850 SATA 500GB SSD into a mid-2011 27" iMac i5. I used a generic Chinese SATA cable from eBay, with no in-line or other kind of thermal sensor because I was led...

https://gbatemp.net/threads/medicat-usb-a-multiboot-linux-usb-for-pc-repair.361577/ Is this legit? As in, is it compiled by a well-meaning individual without malicious intent? At first glance it passes my BS filters but I thought I'd get a differential diagnosis.

Right! Wow, that feel like forever ago.

CounterStrike! Wow, that takes me back. Funnily enough the only game I still play is Team Fortress 2, which was another Half-Life Source spawn.