jaclaz

No. In the sense that I strongly doubt that a NTFS filesystem can be found on 8th sector on a hard disk like device. Normally the VBR of first volume on any partitioned device is (depending on the disk setup/partitioning tool used and under which OS) is normally at offset 63 sectors (before Vista) and at offset 2048 sectors (Vista and later). Are you sure about this "8th sector"? Are you sure you provided the disks in th eright order (or that they were identified properly)? Do you have now a non striped image? Check the first sector of the image (or first sector of both devices). It should be normally a MBR (even if GPT, it would have a "protective" MBR entry). You can access the device or image with DMDE, you should have a situation similar to the screenshot attached (IF the MBR data is still valid). jaclaz

Can you name the people you contacted? jaclaz

The RAID 0 is the most basically form of multi device striping. If you have a (very small) filesystem that is made of 8 blocks (in this case blocks the size of the striping, not necessarily the device block size), you will have on a "normal" single disk blocks arranged as: 1st disk 1-2-3-4-5-4-7-8 When you create a Raid 0 you "stripe" the filesystem on two disks, and you will have: 1st disk 1-3-5-7 2nd disk 2-4-6-8 A destriped image is the result of taking the blocks alternatively from the two devices and arranging them as they would have been on a single disk: Image: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 In "normal" operation of the OS the RAID 0 (be it a hardware raid or a software one) is "transparent" to the user, but when it comes to data recovery, the tool in use may access the device(s) directly or however using algorithms that are not compatible with a non-sequential/multi-device arrangement. If you prefer, once the two devices in a Raid0 have been destriped into a single image, the recovery process is exactly the same if there was not a Raid0, but rather a "normal" single disk/volume. The reasons why *any* filesystem may fail can be mainly caused by: hardware failure <- which can be due to any of the two SSD involved malfunctioning or to one of the two channels to which they are attached (just as an example think what would happen if one of the two cables connecting the devices has a "false contact" software failure <- which can be due both to an issue with a Mass Storage driver in the OS or to an incorrect filesystem driver or to a "wrong" write operation caused by *any* malfunctioning software running in it or even to an issue of some kind in the firmware (please read as BIOS) in the case of a "hardware" RAIDOnce you have accessed a device (or in your case a couple of devices) in DMDE, you do a "scan" to find which (parts of) filesystems it can find, each and every disk image that was saved as "RAW" (or as VMDK or as VHD/VHDX) on the original volume will be found (DMDE has no way to know it is an image and not a partition/volume). It is your duty to find (since it was a single partition volume, from the info you posted, it will be easy) which volume is the "previous one" and select it for further analysis (the volume will be in your case the one which starts first and ends last, i.e. the one with biggest extents). Depending on the actual reason why the corruption occurred and to the specific corruption that occurred (i.e. which areas of the filesystem were affected and how large are the affected areas) recovering a corrupted filesystem can be easy or downright impossible, no way to know in advance. Then again, even if the filesystem is unrecoverable, single files in it may be either fully recoverable (contiguous files) or only partially recoverable or unrecoverable. DMDE is a very powerful tool but it implies (besides studying attentively it's manual/help file) an underlying knowledge of the filesystem that you are going to attempt recovering. jaclaz

The two SSD's (if setup in RAID) can only have been RAID 0 (which is not strictly speaking a RAID level) or in RAID 1. You need to know how it was setup earlier, if you had the two 120 Gb set up in order that combined they made a 240 Gb device, you have Raid 0 (which is a setting for "speed only" as it provides no redundancy whatsoever). I don't think that Gparted (and not even testdisk) are suitable tools to recover a striped in RAID 0 setup. You need a specific tool (or do it manually): http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/library/raid0-recovery.aspx to find the parameters of the Raid and hopefully recover the data that can be recovered. I don't think that there are freeware tools for raid recovery (but I may well be wrong) apart the mentioned one: http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/library/data-recovery-vs-raid-recovery.aspx and DMDE: http://dmde.com/ http://dmde.com/manual/raids.html I am personally very partial to DMDE, which I find an exceptionally good tool, but it is NOT an "automated" or "automagic" kind of tool. Otherwise, you may try using the former to create a destriped image and then you will be able to run (say) Testdisk, CHKDSK on the image to attempt recovering the filesystem and, should this not be possible, attempt recovering the files (photorec and similar). jaclaz

It sounds a lot like recent Microsoft attitude . Seriously, maybe you are in a "early adopter" group. I don't think that there is much experience around for that kind of setup, though experiments into that (or something similar) has been made, I haven't seen reports of people using it on a daily basis (I mean the combination of vhd/vhdx with wim) while each of them separately seem to work fine. Personally (but I am notoriously, besides, picky, cheap and grumpy very "old school") I see a generic issue with compressed files when it comes (if needed) to recover a failed system (but nothing of course that cannot be solved through a "sound" backup strategy ) jaclaz

Well, to be fair, there is as always a bit of hype . The MAC's seemingly have NOT BASH enabled by default (and it is rare to find MACs hosting an http server with CGI and/or PHP). The "corporate" Linux servers, on the other hand, tend to have other means/layers of protection, and at least judging from the effects of the test scanning a nice chap did: http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/09/bash-shellshock-scan-of-internet.html they are pretty much "safe". Detectify has put a simple online test: https://shellshock.detectify.com/ What are really "at risk" are IMHO more the less/badly maintained (or "fake" Open Source) little Linux devices (where the vulnerability may be present BUT NOT most of them as seemingly busybox is not affected) : https://www.nccgroup.com/en/blog/2014/09/shellshock-bash-vulnerability/ but more than that "home made" servers put together by the "half technical" good guys (technical enough to put together such a system, but not enough to secure it effectively) and devices that use a "more sophisticated" environment than busybox. In any case, the vulnerability is a rather serious one in theory, but in practice the actual effects (if any) seem like being much more limited than what initially hypothesized as, besides the BASH vulnerability it seems like there must be a number of concurrent factors to make the exploit actually have some impact. https://community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2014/09/25/bash-ing-into-your-network-investigating-cve-2014-6271 jaclaz

And light bulbs. Same mentioned article (go to the original to get the other links): http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html This is specific to LFIX light bulbs AND it is about another vulnerability, but the point made remains (potentially) valid: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/security-vulnerability-found-in-lifx-smart-light-bulbs-exposes-home-wifi-passwords-20140709-zt12p.html jaclaz

Maybe it is still connected with the "circumventing" mentioned in Rule #1.a? http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?app=forums&module=extras&section=boardrules jaclaz

Maybe it's 88 pages because people don't take the little time to look into what was posted and makes a new post asking where a given topic has been discussed? However : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170850-aero-glass-for-win81-125/?p=1085704 jaclaz

You may need to take note that not ALL cars made in the 1970's were Ford Pinto's . But of course you are right, about the attempt to make better (safer) products, with the only downside that sometimes they don't work or don't work as expected. Getting more practical, in the 70's and 80's having a flat tire was if not "common" something that any driver experienced several times, it is now what, 15 years or 20 that myself or anyone in my family has not got one. Something has become better, be it the wheels, the tires, the roads does not really matter, as long as the result is positive. Still, dishwashers, washing machines and fridges made in the 70's often worked 20 years or more, without a hitch, while now we have electronic, touch screen, wi-fi enabled "intelligent" washing machines that will probably work for 3 or 5 years only (but you might get, while driving in your fully connected car, some three hundreds miles away, a senseless SMS telling you that the washing cycle ended successfully and that the machine is ready for a new one[1]). jaclaz [1] Btw, according to Murphy's Law, the message will be in Korean and you will be distracted by it and crash into the road barrier

Some more data: http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/09/everything-you-need-to-know-about.html jaclaz

Well, the good ol' Old Indian (apocryphal) example of the blanket is not that bad, JFYI: Consider also the "other" possible consequences in practice : and, in order to avoid a possible accusation (actually true) of being biased: jaclaz

Which OS is that? This is for XP: http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/314999/en-us which being in the form of a screensaver it is easy to deploy/setup. Here you will find some alternatives for Windows 7: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/d358382c-e91b-4e91-a1e8-04c53cfd91ce/automatic-logout-after-inactivityidle?forum=w7itprogeneral including a "similar" screensaver: http://www.grimadmin.com/staticpages/index.php/ss-operations And, in any case for a public PC (like a library) most probably something *like* SteadyState, DeepFreeze or similar should be used, and these softwares may already have an in-built similar function. jaclaz

Yep, the not-so-slight difference is the source, I would guess that should be a different level of reliability attributed to a carnival barker (or to a tv show producer) and to a reknown University Professor. Of course academic people are reknown for their jokes , and from time to time it is fun to go through the editor and "peers" review and get an "absurd" paper actually published by , but usually when this happens the joke is publicly exposed soon after, in this case this one went seemingly unnoticed.... A couple fun (or sad) reports on scientific papers and the level of some conferences/publications: http://smritiweb.com/navin/education-2/how-i-published-a-fake-paper-and-why-it-is-the-fault-of-our-education-system http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full a bit extreme, but I believe that these are the point of the iceberg, as I expect that most people would be much better at faking (or plagiarize) than what the good ol' scigen can do. jaclaz

Not that I presented it as such: The point here is that the "original" (wrong, but easily fixable) approach of "forcing" the user to keep the RTC on "local time" took all of more than 7 years to be addressed (BTW, the provision had ALREADY been there in Windows NT but was "forgotten"), then once the (simple, small) bug was fixed, it was re-introduced twice or thrice. The point being that the actual cause of the problem emerged in the early days of computing only when the PC started to get "interconnected" and was addressed by the POSIX standard in a more than satisfying manner. For whatever reasons the good MS guys did not conform (or did not conform fully) to it and continued using the (flawed) MS-DOS approach (which would have been alright in itself had everything being coded "right" and there weren't the - already known - needs for interconnection). When finally the possibility of having the RTC set to GMT was given (with Vista SP2 and Windows 7) thus solving a whole set of small possible issues, MS repeatedly created in updates further issues (possibly even worse than the original ones). Since date and time are in themselves a precious part of the computing world one would have expected from MS some more attention and care to the specific implementations. Just for the fun of it, I will provide you a nice link: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4967903/linux-windows-timezone-mapping check particularly the "Obligatory Time Zone Rant:" which may lead you to here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2008_April_22#Romance_Standard_Time which hints how the whole "Romance Standard Time" might be a quiet invention of the good MS guys More seriously, the good MS guys are not alone in making a mess of this specific topic, as there are (scarcely populated) timezones that do not actually exist http://www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/t=11879/ jaclaz

You'd better get a double one today, strong and black, as seemingly you need it. Time/Date (mis)management has been a traditional issue since the advent of computers, and the number of issues (minor or major) that have been caused by it worldwide are slightly more relevant than what you might have experienced in your local (US) and personal (home) usage of a computer. Consider how FAT (and other filesystems, like CDFS ) save date/time in "local time" (CDFS has additionally a field for offset from Greenwich) whilst NTFS saves them in UTC, and how in the past there were several cases of issues with Windows based computers keeping date/time, a few ones: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909915/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2400550/en-us March 2007 has been a busy month on the DEDICATED BLOG that MS had to put online : http://blogs.technet.com/b/dst2007/archive/2007/03.aspx for an astounding number of issues which not necessarily are "Microsoft's fault" as a number of them are connected to changes in local Laws, the point made in the article is that for a number of reasons the "conversion" may fail and that the "design" of the whole thing is broken, as you have an automated manipulation of the RTC that may easily fail: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dst2007/archive/2007/03/11/time-zones-not-updating-on-windows-2003-windows-xp-or-windows-2000.aspx More or less *anything* that has a need for "synchronization" or that however relies on date/time to perform some automated action is subject (thanks to Murphy's Law) to an increased risk of failing. A case where a dual boot system caused a mis-setting of the RTC clock: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/22.34.html#subj3.1 And right following a case about the known possible issues with cross-platform filestamps local or through a remote connection: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q129574 Surely these issues are not very common for the "average Joe" and most of them are avoided by "solid" programming/scheduling/procedures by the IT managers of international firms, but still it is (was) a completely wrong approach, particularly when it is "common" between "home" OS's and Server OS's. jaclaz

Wait until catcoins get more ground http://www.catcoins.org/ Of course should I personally EVER deal with these senseless "vapourware" money (something which I strongly doubt), guess which one I would probably choose? jaclaz

Yep, guessing (because you did not explicitly provide this piece of information) that the distance was a small one and in the case of both back office and shop being in the same building and under the same electrical switchbox, I was suggesting you how instead of running a dedicated network cable it would have been faster and easier to buy, besides the network cards for the PC's, two "powerline adapters", examples: http://www.cnet.com/topics/networking/best-networking-devices/power-line-adapters/ for your uses any of the "low cost" of the common "500" series, which you can have for less than 50 bucks each, would be a nicely working solution. Unless you do the cabling yourself (but then you would probably have not asked the question ), this would possibly be even cheaper then the cable[1] + wall sockets + electrician wages AND with the advantage that if you change your mind (and move your desks or PC's or whatever) you don't need to move the wall sockets or use long patch cables from the PC's to the sockets, as you can move the adapter to another closer electric plug. But if you want to go down the good ol' way of physical cabling, it's fine as well, you just need to run the cable from point A to point B, you won't *need* right now a CAT 6 cable (a CAT 5e would do nicely) but if you are doing the cabling, it would be a good idea to use CAT 6 anyway, as the difference in the cost of the cable is not that much, examples: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Unbranded-100-ft-24-Gauge-4-Pair-Category-5e-Riser-Internet-Wire-2700-0104C/202206477 http://www.homedepot.com/p/Cerrowire-100-ft-23-4-Category-6-Riser-Cable-Blue-2704-0144CR/202637224 jaclaz [1] Please consider how, unless you use a Crossover cable or auto-sensing network cards, you would probably need additionally a small hub,

Good. jaclaz

Wait a minute. If the thingy is SATA connected, it should be "hot swappable", or not? http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm jaclaz

For NO apparent reason, BIG DRONES http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/24/6839225/facebook-says-its-internet-drones-will-be-the-size-of-747s (though possibly an engineer that uses indifferently Toyota Prius's and 747's as units of measure is not IMHO particularly reliable): jaclaz

Well, but you have to recognize that one can at the same time provide better anti-bot protection (serious computing) and help abandoned animals (be involved in bettering the society) . http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/asirra/ And this also answers partially the previous questions about what some of the good MS guys have been up to lately ... Though of course cats (particularly lolcats) are much more popular on the internet than dogs (or loldogs), the question is clearly biased towards cats as it is fixed into: ”Please select all the cat photos:” Additionally (to show how international is the approach, and how the culture of attention to details is rooted in Redmond ) it is "fixed" in English: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:Asirra And now, for NO apparent reason: jaclaz

I have to thank you, instead , it is refreshing to know that I am not the only one in the world that see little use for a (BTW poorly implemented) selective user access on a home PC. jaclaz

Huge bump, I know , but happened by pure chance (thanks to Marc Abrahams and Sally Shelton): http://www.improbable.com/2014/06/08/an-academic-squint-at-mermaids/ to find a nice explanation about mermaids, how they possibly existed but probably became extinct in recent times, direct link to the .pdf of the article by Prof. Karl Banse: http://www.aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_35/issue_1/0148.pdf published in 1990 on the journal Limnology and Oceanography. jaclaz

And, if I may, there is nothing IMHO less useful as a "forced" form/poll. I would (as well as say 35% to 75% of BOTH students and professors) fill the "altro" field with the first absurd profession that would cross my mind at the moment. Like you know : flaming bowls jugglerpsychotropicistnuclear steam engine pilotetc.making the data collected - to say the least - unreliable. This said, something very similar has been solved recently on reboot.pro, here (only seemingly unrelated): http://reboot.pro/topic/20001-minlogon-and-explorerexe/ where, besides the actually adopted solution, several possible alternatives were discussed. jaclaz