jaclaz

Right angles boil at 90°, right? jaclaz

I am not sure to understand the question, if it is "how do I find to which file these 5 sectors belong to?", in DMDE you can create the (NTFS) cluster map and check on it. https://dmde.com/manual/clustermap.html If you want to compare-compare the results (given you have enough disk space) you can mount the DMDE dd-like image (even IMDISK will do for this purpose) then Robocopy out of it and compare the two Robocopy outputs though the results will (should) be identical. You can also try doing a (partial) image on reverse, it used to be a thing in the past, though I doubt it has any advantage on modern disks. jaclaz

It depends, but it doesn't seem like easy to do. https://gist.github.com/LukeZGD/9d781f1b03a69fa46869384a9407a41a good luck. jaclaz

Ah well, if Euronosta is not impressed that says something. jaclaz

Only to understand how these highly sophisticated soviet/ex-DDR communist agents operate: 1) they wait until you go visit your Bavarian friends 2) they break into your house (not necessarily a fortress house) 3) they rely on autorun to infect your PC 4) when (if) you wisely disabled autorun they go away muttering the equivalent (in Russian or German) of "D@mn, we can't do anything, autorun is disabled". jaclaz

Look for I/O Errors here: https://dmde.com/manual/devioparams.html One of the good things is that you can choose a pattern to fill skipped sectors. jaclaz

Not really *needed* in your case, but you don't really-really want to use linux dd or ddrescue (or dd_rescue). If you don't like/are not confident with command line tools you can use DMDE (from windows) to make an image: https://dmde.com/ using dmde as a recovery tool or disk editor is a bit complex but the imaging part is straightforward. jaclaz

I did understand that he was referring to UCyborg, mainly because D.Draker quoted him, but from Czechia to Slovenia there is some distance, maybe he was confused with Slovakia? jaclaz

As most (if not all) decisions on Wikipedia (right or wrong as it may be) it seems like the usual internal war about who has more power or is capable to win a logic argument on the (stupidly complex) wikipedia internal rules and voting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Google_Chrome_version_history_(2nd_nomination) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#Google_Chrome_version_history_(2nd_nomination) jaclaz

Sure, it must have been done *not from the internal disk*, but the questions (unanswered) are more about what does fdisk actually do and whether a fdisk /MBR would have helped (or not). The generic (by me) suggestion to wipe the first 100 sectors of an hard disk when making a new install/partitioning would likely have avoided the problem, but the curiosity remains about what remained on disk that caused the issue and that diskpart clean removed. jaclaz

Whose country? The Author of Hdat2, a re-known and appreciated program was - last time I checked - Czech. The program has been around since forever (since 2004 or earlier), the possible issue with it is only that is DOS based so that - likely - in a short timeframe it won't be possible to run it on "common" modern motherboards (with UEFI only, without CSM/BIOS). About Kontron, they should be industrial grade boards (please read as very tough, usually slower than current retail boards, and - again usually - costly). Still, while they may well be engineered and assembled in Germany, they may be produced in various EU countries, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia: https://www.kontron-electronics.com/production/#c18 BUT, for large quantities: https://www.kontron-electronics.com/production/ they have cooperation with Asian manufacturers "Very large unit quantities are produced by our collaboration partner Ennoconn, a subsidiary of Foxconn". And of course their board assembly lines need anyway to source the components in China, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. Thomson says little nowadays, there are a few companies connected to the "historical" Thomson (which was fractioned/dissolved/bought/merged some 20 years ago), right now AFAIK the brand for consumer electronics is property of Established Inc., together with many (once traditional european ones such as Nordmende and Saba): https://established.inc/ https://established.inc/brands/ incorporated in Delaware, offers branding to *anyone* (please read as "to Chinese manufacturers"). The effects of globalization (like it or not) are so deep that today *anything* related to electronics is anyway originating in some Asian country, you simply cannot avoid that. The US are (again, rightly or wrongly) considering to re-gain manufacturing capabilities, but (if it will ever happen it will take years) while in EU there are only some projects of trifling relevance. As a side note, last time I was in Sweden (circa 2016) the representative of a local company operating in the steel sector (that I won't name for two reasons, first one being that I don't remember their name) for a large national building project told me how most of their steel products[1] were manufactured in China anyway (under their supervision and with excellent quality control, still ...). jaclaz [1] Sweden was once re-known in Europe for the quality of some "special" steel products

Please, no. Low-level format does not exist since more than 20 (more like 30) years. A manufacturer tool may (or may not) provide a way to check the ECC of sectors and re-map them, but that is NOT "low-level format". You probably (hopefully) want to suggest a complete 00 wiping of the hard disk (which is not low-level formatting). Using Spinrite 6.0 on a 500GB disk is - more than anything else - an act of faith in the future seeking capabilities of Steve Gibson. jaclaz

But not during setup, so in this case it remains more probable voodoo or the full moon at install time (if it was wednesday). jaclaz

Maybe. But during setup? Can you detail which cases? AFAIK (in it's time) there have been countless dual and triple boot installs with 98 and 2K or XP, and the presence of a non 00 disk signature never created an install issue for Windows 98 (that I can remember), and more often than not these installs (and re-installs) were rarely performed on a wiped disk. In 9x/Me there are the "mistery bytes" but they are in a different position than the disk signature and they only come into play if there is a collision with another disk: https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/mystery.htm and in any case fdisk should well be able to take care of them. jaclaz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images jaclaz

Yes, at the very least, you should go through these three steps (though here they are listed about metal detectors, should be applicable to other devices as well): https://kts-electronic.com/en/made-in-germany.html Still the issue about the possibility of having to deal with ex-DDR communists and not integrally German ancestry of employees would remain unsolved. jaclaz

Well, JFYI, I have a few thin clients, good, ol' Fujitsu Siemens Futro S200/S300 (re-adapted as router/firewall) and - curiously enough - they have a TR5670 motherboard, manufactured by by TECO Electric and Machinery Co., Ltd: https://www.teco.com.tw/fa/about.htm which sports a (crappy BTW) Insyde BIOS: https://www.insyde.com/company/fast-facts with a Transmeta Crusoe 800 processor, Transmeta was an American fabless company, processors were actually manufactured, you guess, in Taiwan, by TSMC (part of the Acer group). We are talking of hardware some 20 years old, so it is not a particularly recent trend to outsource the actual manufacturing to Taiwan (or China). jaclaz

You are welcome. There are several possible interpretations to the lack of interest you noticed: 1) your topics are not interesting 2) your topics are interesting (generally speaking) but not appreciated by MSFN members (because of their narrow minds) 3) your topics are interesting and lots of people on MSFN actually like them secretly, but fear that explicitly showing their interest in them will expose them to retaliations of some kind (only as an example targeted EMP attacks) Hard to say which one is more plausible, I would personally think #1, but that is just like my opinion. jaclaz

Sure, and noone said (or at least I never said) that this kind of posts violate MSFN rules. They do violate the (unwritten) rules of good taste and common sense, which are - as you might well know - two among the most uncommon things, and anyway very flexible and personal ones, so noone (I believe) should be banned for violating them. But a stern look of disapproval seems appropriate anyway: jaclaz

What you report is very strange, as you say bizarre. On a "normal" disk once you re-format the partition(s), even as a quick format, nothing (accessible) remains on the partition(s) themselves, i.e. while the data is still there the newly created FAT tables make the data non accessible at a logical level. Fdisk deletes the partition table and should (but it would need to be confirmed) re-write also the MBR code (and possibly also 00 out the DIsk Signature, but in any case the Disk Signature is not used on non NT systems). So the only thing that remains are the so-called hidden sectors (typically sectors LBA 1-62) but those should not be accessed at all during install or normal operation. The diskpart clean should clean also those hidden sectors, so it is possible that this was the difference, still it is strange that those sectors were accessed/checked at all. Maybe it was just voodoo (sometimes it just happens). Happy you managed to solve the issue and thanks for reporting. maybe (hopefully) it will never happen again, but if it does, someone may be able to find this and solve the issue as well. jaclaz

And a related one, actually sponsored by Anne Arundel County, Maryland: https://www.aacounty.org/departments/office-of-emergency-management/emergency-information/before/electromagnetic-pulse.html

Some unrelated videos:

I thought, if every one can post on MSFN crappy random youtube video, why can't I do the same?

I thought, if every one can post on MSFN crappy random youtube video, why can't I do the same?

I thought, if every one can post on MSFN crappy random youtube video, why can't I do the same?