File retrieval from a crashed drive

[Hermit]

Early versions of M$ Excel included the ability to read *.WKx files and to convert them to Micro$oft's proprietary format. This was in order to make it easier for Lotus 123 users to migrate to Excel. By the time IBM had bought Lotus and the latter came out with the *.123 file format, its market share had dropped by so much that M$ no longer felt the need to assist the migration process, let alone modify its conversion facility to include the latest file format, and dropped the lot instead.

As for Vbox, Wine or whatever, that is just another thing on the large heap of things yet to be done. I did not realise just how much I've added to the previous setup to make it do stuff that the OS by itself would not. VPN, streaming file downloader, various other utilities. I have not even set up email on the new setup yet. Ideally, I would want to retain and keep accessible all my received and sent Hotmail messages, most of which are archived in a location I have not even bothered to find. Having used Hotmail ever since I ditched my AOL account, I don't really want to require my contacts to change their details of me. I could do a mass mailout, but I know that quite a few receivers will be at a loss about how to add my new address to their list and/or keep losing the details somehow. It's not as though they are stupid. It's just that as long as they can use a word processor, open a browser and send/receive messages, they could not care less about anything else to do with computers. It's like most car drivers. As long as they know enough to get to their shopping centre, work or ferry their kids between home, school and friends, they don't feel they need to know. Problems with the car? Well, that's why god created mechanics.

[JimC]

Dammit all, Hermit, you know that mechanics evolved naturally from blacksmiths!

[Jason]

Then why are there no wheeled blacksmiths? Huh? yeah.. think about that.

[Hermit]

How's that Linux thing workin for ya?

Mixed results. I use the computer I'm on right now, which runs on Mint 17.2 90% of the time. It's good for most, though not all of the the simple stuff. The Linux versions of several programs I have working fine under Win 8.1 are not doing as they're told, though. Worst of all, the driver for my networked printer refuses to let me print even a test page despite the fact that I am pretty sure that I have followed the installation instructions to the letter. Also, the search function of the file manager that comes with Mint is utter crap. No fucking wildcards allowed, would you believe! The Linux versions of All Video Downloader and, Orbit don't fucking work at all and Audacity won't let me capture streaming audio. For all that shit I need to crank up the Win laptop. Then there are my spreadsheets. Calc loses all charts, macros and all but the most basic formatting of Excel files and it won't even touch Lotus 1-2-3 stuff. Looks like it's going to be a long time before I am rid of MS Win.

[piscator]

My diesel truck won't run for shit on petrol, and my car engine knocks when I fill up with diesel.

Printer...what kind? Brother puts out self installing .debs and .rpms. Epson is legendary for being assholes about Linux, and won't support Linux, ever, as a matter of honor. I run Brothers at home and work as a matter of principle.
Video downloaders....A battlefield. Youtube and Vimeo have rooms full of people working three shifts/day to prevent downloading videos. Most video downloaders only work for a week or two before they're countered by whatever hosting they were designed to steal from.
Spreadsheets...I use industry-standard Excel because I produce spreadsheets for $$ and can't afford to fuck around. Same with AutoCad.

Solutions: Run Windows in a VM on Linux. Look for a new video downloader every week. Go $50 for a Brother inkjet printer/scanner/copier/fax, download Linux drivers from Brother FTW.

[Hermit]

My diesel truck won't run for shit on petrol, and my car engine knocks when I fill up with diesel.

That's no laughing matter. My son in law makes a living out of that. Gets about two or three callouts by stranded motorists. Charges $175 per job, and that is out of a population of just half a million.

Printer...what kind? Brother puts out self installing .debs and .rpms. Epson is legendary for being assholes about Linux, and won't support Linux, ever, as a matter of honor. I run Brothers at home and work as a matter of principle.
Video downloaders....A battlefield. Youtube and Vimeo have rooms full of people working three shifts/day to prevent downloading videos. Most video downloaders only work for a week or two before they're countered by whatever hosting they were designed to steal from.
Spreadsheets...I use industry-standard Excel because I produce spreadsheets for $$ and can't afford to fuck around. Same with AutoCad.

Solutions: Run Windows in a VM on Linux. Look for a new video downloader every week. Go $50 for a Brother inkjet printer/scanner/copier/fax, download Linux drivers from Brother FTW.

Printer is a Canon 5050N colour laser. Canon provides a Linux driver for when the printer is connected to the computer via USB. I got it connected to three computers via the LAN. The software for that sees its address, recognises the printer, pretty much does everything else it can do with it except fucking print.

I had no need to update video downloaders on the Win laptop since I installed them a year ago or more.

A VM seems the way to go, though my miserable success rate installing additional software to the Mint OS is a real discouragement to have yet another go at adding one.

[piscator]

Printer - Use CUPS to find the printer and allow users to print. You may need to install a Canon cups driver in addition to the printer driver to make it happen. CUPS is Apple, so if a printer will work with Apple, there's a way to make it work with Linux.

https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-insta ... ke-systems

Windows video downloaders - are subject to the same bs that every other youtube downloaders are susceptible to. The problem's on Google's end. It's copyright warfare.

Exporting/importing spreadsheets - I suspect you need to set a switch (filter), or convert to some other format before you export Lotus or Excel files.

https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question ... t-filters/


VirtualBox runs just fine on Mint. Any problems will be on your end. Just make sure to go into your computer's BIOS and enable all the virtuaization options (VT-X, VT-D or AMD-V, IOMMU, etc)

[Brian Peacock]

Spreadsheets : export/save as CSV, which can be imported by most top spreadsheet applications.

Video Download : when watching a YouTube the streamed video file is stored in a deep folder and given an incredibly unhelpful filename. A little research can reveal these files, which can be dealt with by hand, but if you're streaming Flash files then the Macromedia browser plugin deletes these files as you go along. However, the Firefox plugin VideoDownload Helper knows the folder on Linux systems and adds a button to Youtube pages that allows you to save the video, in a variety of formats, to your default Downloads folder with the video's title as the filename. Still working for me on Lubuntu 14.04. If you want to download BBC iPlayer TV/Radio on Linux search for "get_iplayer" and prepare for a fair bit of reading.

I gave up saving YouTubes due to lack of storage and instead built a little browser app to archive the links I like and create an embed on the fly at the click of a mouse. I've got a page for documentaries, a page for music, a page for pugilism, a page for movies, a page for tv shows. I really should run all this off a single JSON file or something, but I can't be arsed.

[Hermit]

Thought to continue with the nascent derail from over there here, where it no longer is a derail.

If you don't have VLC, see if mplayer recognizes your TV card.

Mint can see the card and recognises the chip it uses.

lspci -vnn returns

03:07.0 Multimedia controller [0480]: Philips Semiconductors SAA7134/SAA7135HL Video Broadcast Decoder [1131:7134] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Compro Technology, Inc. Videomate DVB-T300 [185b:c900]
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 21
Memory at fdcff000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable)
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: saa7134

I have no idea what the command dmesg | grep -i saa713 does, except for the fact that it is reporting something about the TV card

[ 11.275144] saa7130/34: v4l2 driver version 0, 2, 17 loaded
[ 11.275271] saa7134[0]: found at 0000:03:07.0, rev: 1, irq: 21, latency: 32, mmio: 0xfdcff000
[ 11.275276] saa7134[0]: subsystem: 185b:c900, board: Compro Videomate DVB-T300 [card=70,autodetected]
[ 11.275289] saa7134[0]: board init: gpio is 843f00
[ 11.309683] input: saa7134 IR (Compro Videomate DV as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.4/0000:03:07.0/rc/rc0/input4
[ 11.309747] rc0: saa7134 IR (Compro Videomate DV as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.4/0000:03:07.0/rc/rc0
[ 11.461610] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 00: 5b 18 00 c9 54 20 1c 00 43 43 a9 1c 55 d2 b2 92
[ 11.461616] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 10: 00 ff 86 0f ff 20 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461620] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 20: 01 40 01 03 03 ff 03 01 08 ff 00 87 ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461624] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 30: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461628] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 40: ff 02 00 c2 86 10 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461631] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 50: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff cb
[ 11.461635] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 60: 34 ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461639] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 70: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461642] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 80: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461646] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom 90: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461650] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom a0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461653] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom b0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461657] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom c0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461660] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom d0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461664] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom e0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.461668] saa7134[0]: i2c eeprom f0: ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
[ 11.617767] saa7134[0]: registered device video0 [v4l2]
[ 11.617808] saa7134[0]: registered device vbi0
[ 11.619904] saa7134 ALSA driver for DMA sound loaded
[ 11.619923] saa7134[0]/alsa: saa7134[0] at 0xfdcff000 irq 21 registered as card -2
[ 11.645711] DVB: registering new adapter (saa7134[0])
[ 11.645717] saa7134 0000:03:07.0: DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (Philips TDA10046H DVB-T)...

Ditto for the following commands

modprobe -vr saa7134_dvb

rmmod saa7134_dvb
rmmod videobuf_dvb
rmmod dvb_core

sudo modprobe -vr saa7134_alsa

modprobe: FATAL: Module saa7134_alsa is in use.

sudo modprobe -vr saa7134

modprobe: FATAL: Module saa7134 is in use.

sudo modprobe -v saa7134 card=70 returns nothing at all.

Also, I wonder what is using the saa7143 chip. If it is VLC, the program it's doing nothing with it that I can see. I don't even know where to go after clicking on <media> ---> <capture device>. All options I tried so far give me an error message: Your input can't be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL 'dvb-t://frequency=0000:bandwidth=0'. Check the log for details.

ETA: I just discovered in this site that I need to add the following line to the 'options' file in /etc/modprobe.d/

option saa7134 card=70 tuner=67

Unfortunately that page has not been updated since 2009, so I don't know if it still gives right advice. There are 14 configuration files in /etc/modprobe.d , and none of their names begin with "options". Looks like more digging is required.



And shut yer fucking gob JimC.

[pErvinalia]

My diesel truck won't run for shit on petrol, and my car engine knocks when I fill up with diesel.

That's no laughing matter. My son in law makes a living out of that. Gets about two or three callouts by stranded motorists. Charges $175 per job, and that is out of a population of just half a million.

I put petrol in my diesel cruiser once. I blame Caltex ( ). At the time (not sure if it is the same still), they called their diesel "Vortex" and one of their petrol varieties "Vortex", while the other petrol varieties were called "Petrol". Stupid practice and the guy at the till said it's a common mistake. Thankfully I was right next to a mechanic (and supermarket where I could by a couple of spare jerry cans to save the fuel in). So I drove over there on my spare tank and drained it out there. Then used the diesely petrol mixed with a bit more diesel for control burns (and rubbish burns) on my farm.

[pErvinalia]

Spreadsheets : export/save as CSV, which can be imported by most top spreadsheet applications.

Video Download : when watching a YouTube the streamed video file is stored in a deep folder and given an incredibly unhelpful filename. A little research can reveal these files, which can be dealt with by hand, but if you're streaming Flash files then the Macromedia browser plugin deletes these files as you go along. However, the Firefox plugin VideoDownload Helper knows the folder on Linux systems and adds a button to Youtube pages that allows you to save the video, in a variety of formats, to your default Downloads folder with the video's title as the filename. Still working for me on Lubuntu 14.04. If you want to download BBC iPlayer TV/Radio on Linux search for "get_iplayer" and prepare for a fair bit of reading.

I gave up saving YouTubes due to lack of storage and instead built a little browser app to archive the links I like and create an embed on the fly at the click of a mouse. I've got a page for documentaries, a page for music, a page for pugilism, a page for movies, a page for tv shows. I really should run all this off a single JSON file or something, but I can't be arsed.

I used to save Youtube videos via grabbing them out of the cache, but they changed their approach a few years ago and downloaded the file in parts. So it was no longer possible (or perhaps practical) to dig them out of the cache. Do you find you can still do that on your Linux box?

[Brian Peacock]

Nah, I use the FF extension when I want to download, the correct name for which is actually 'Download Youtube Videos as MP4' - and not what I said before. Other than that I just collate a set of links and load them in a handmade page for viewing.

[pErvinalia]

Yep, FF extensions for me now too.

[Hermit]

Spreadsheets : export/save as CSV, which can be imported by most top spreadsheet applications.

Video Download : when watching a YouTube the streamed video file is stored in a deep folder and given an incredibly unhelpful filename. A little research can reveal these files, which can be dealt with by hand, but if you're streaming Flash files then the Macromedia browser plugin deletes these files as you go along. However, the Firefox plugin VideoDownload Helper knows the folder on Linux systems and adds a button to Youtube pages that allows you to save the video, in a variety of formats, to your default Downloads folder with the video's title as the filename. Still working for me on Lubuntu 14.04. If you want to download BBC iPlayer TV/Radio on Linux search for "get_iplayer" and prepare for a fair bit of reading.

I gave up saving YouTubes due to lack of storage and instead built a little browser app to archive the links I like and create an embed on the fly at the click of a mouse. I've got a page for documentaries, a page for music, a page for pugilism, a page for movies, a page for tv shows. I really should run all this off a single JSON file or something, but I can't be arsed.

I used to save Youtube videos via grabbing them out of the cache, but they changed their approach a few years ago and downloaded the file in parts. So it was no longer possible (or perhaps practical) to dig them out of the cache. Do you find you can still do that on your Linux box?

A couple of months ago I downloaded seven Adam Curtis documentaries on my Windows laptop using Orbit or A-tube Catcher without a problem. Over two gigs with just a few clicks.

[Hermit]

My diesel truck won't run for shit on petrol, and my car engine knocks when I fill up with diesel.

That's no laughing matter. My son in law makes a living out of that. Gets about two or three callouts by stranded motorists. Charges $175 per job, and that is out of a population of just half a million.

I put petrol in my diesel cruiser once.

Doing a delivery run of cartoned meat on Sydney's North Shore I realised that I wasn't going to have enough fuel to get back to the depot, so pulled up at a servo in Mona Vale. To my surprise an attendant approached the cab and said he'd fill the tank for me. This was years after driveway service had been dispensed with, so that was a bit of a surprise. Oh, well, may as well take the opportunity to point Percy at the porcelain. I looked back and noticed the tank did not line up with the Diesel pump too well, so I started the truck up again, moved it in line with the appropriate bowser and headed for the toilet. Ten bucks' worth, thanks. That'll get me back home. Then I bought some snack and handed paid, and took off. Not quite a kilometre up the road the motor died. Yup. The attendant used a petrol bowser that was not even in line with the tank filler. An hour to wait for a truck that could tow an eight tonner and an hour to drain the tank, crack the jets and prime them. I mentioned in passing that the mishap will cost my boss a couple of hours in penalty rates. The station owner said he'll fix that and filled the tank right up. It was a 200 litre tank.