I did once manage to mount an external USB NTFS drive to a VirtualBox-hosted copy of Windows 7 and was actually able to defrag it. I assume I also ran a quick disk check before that, but it was a long time ago now.
Before I did it, I backed up everything important off the drive to another location just in case. I'd recommend you do the same.
As to how I did it, I'm afraid I don't remember, but it can't have been that difficult. There may have been some kind of raw mount option in the virtualisation software.
The other potential obstacle is the fact that things have moved on since I did it. Newer Windows / NTFS might be not be as easy to fool into accepting a drive over weird virtualisation pathways. Or the virtualisation software might not allow it as easily or at all.
Brings back memories of running “The Upper Room BBS” and “007 BBS” as a teenager in the late 80’s as a SYSOP. Those were fond memories, of having someone dial into your computer and making online friends from across the country sometimes.
I think now though, you can just Telnet into different BBS’s still.
Almost a decade ago there was a discussion how to draw into display buffers for Wayland. Everybody agreed on using Mesa GBM, nvidia wasn’t really interested, but said they’d do EGLstreams.
As nvidia wasn’t interested, and generally is a dick to everybody anyway Wayland development just progressed ignoring nvidia, and now they have to catch up to where all the other graphics driver were at already years ago. While ignoring most of the things those others learned, because they want to keep their own tiny proprietary island.
Just avoid supporting nvidias dickish behaviour by not giving them money, and eventually they might learn and change.
Depends on specific machine setup and how good the backup is.
Backup requirements for /usr there are sticky bits set on some binaries. That needs to be preserved. In all cases soft links likely need to be preserved for things to work correctly on future package installs. Hard links can be problematic, but if you have a large enough drive or not that many it wont matter. Running package verification can be help after restore to make sure everything looks right. If running a Linux system with SELinux in enforcing mode (RHEL on many derivatives), then the security context will also need to be preserved BUT running a relabel will probably work if the security context was not included in backups. Sometimes running the relabel process wont work if there are files that needs a specific security context but are not listed in the security context database. Can’t provide more details because most of my experience with that is on systems we just replace (LSPP custom labeling resulted in systems that if you booted into permissive would then be unbootable, so they were just reinstalled once any debugging was done).
For /boot things can get tricky depending on the distribution, what boot manager is used, and /boot was a separate partition or not. Basically the boot manager (probably grub) needs to know how to find the files in boot so it can load the kernel. In most cases if you restore /boot and rerun the tools to update the boot manger everything will be fine. BUT some distributions, hardware setups, or dual boot configurations are more complicated, so extra work might be needed.
You didn’t mention /dev, which is all special files. These don’t need to be restored, just make sure the right processes recreate them. There are tools to do this, hopefully the packages are installed. Or boot from a rescue disk and fix it. Look up instruction for your specific distro.
I made the switch to Linux about 1.5 years ago. Never looked back. I started with Linux Mint and have been happy with it ever since. Now, I’m learning about Arch Linux and trying to make that my primary driver.
FYI, you don’t have to get a Steam Deck to try out gaming. I’m sure your current distro would support that quite well. But, if you’re looking for something that is portable, then I definitely recommend the Steam Deck. Now is a good time to get one, since they released a refresh with an OLED screen. Also, the Steam Deck runs on Arch Linux, so if you’re ever interested in checking that out, then definitely get a Steam Deck.
The repo is full of any software you might need, including proprietary (through xbps-src).
Everything just works, if it doesn’t it’s probably your fault.
It’s a rolling release distro, yet focused on stability and usabilty, so you won’t get the latest and greates, but instead builds that are known to be solid. For example the kernel, it’s not the latest, as is with Arch, but it’s maybe one or two minor versions behin. The same applies to software, they’re known to jump versions if the current build proves to be unstable.
Lightning fast boot up. It’s also the fastest distro there is, apart from the *BSDs.
Compiling and testing is a breeze thanks to xbps-src.
A lot of tools and scripts that make building templates for software not in the repo very easy.
Supports a lot of architectures. NetBSD is the only other POSIX OS that supports more architectures than Void.
There are other things, I’m sure, but these are the ones I can think of ATM.
it’s pretty much just arch without systemd then. which is enough of a dealbreaker for me, as I think that systemd is the best thing to happen to linux since sliced bread.
No, it’s not Arch without systemd. Arch breaks a lot more than Void does. Ask Void users when was the last time a Void update broke their system. I use it as a daily driver, plus for a lot of other things (at work and home) that are considered mission critical. I would never use Arch for that. Also, it’s faster than Arch, it supports A LOT more architectures than Arch does… or any other Linux distro for that matter (LFS excluded).
You should also probably try and see if the same thing happens in a VM. The flash drive might be failing and I don’t think Void does CRC checks of files when copying them… definitely not when funning them, like the installer for example.
EDIT: I remember the installer bringing me back to the partitioning setup, but that’s because I partition manually, not through the Void installer, so the installer thinks that that step is skipped. No worries though, just go to the end of the installer setup and continue with the provided settings. If an adequate target partition has been set, it will install Void.
Do you know any other distro that’s not LFS or Gentoo that still supports x86? I said a lot, not everything. Most distros don’t support anything below 64-bits.
A fork supported PPC up until a while ago. That project halted though. There was a new spin on it, can’t remember the distro’s name though.
xbps-src can cross compile for MIPS. There are no packages in the repo for MIPS though.
As people have said in some of the many, many other threads on this subject, if they really wanted to copy someone else's style of full-screen error message they'd have done much better to go with "Guru Meditation"
Not until I can have my pretty screensavers. Yes, I care. When my laptops are on battery they don’t need to S3 sleep, nor s0idle. They just show pretty animations that prompt for a password and let me in, without waiting ten years for it to wake up from its slumber
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