when Ritsuko times out

So I just went down town today and got two 80pin U320 SCSI drives, one 18GB and the other 73GB for 20CAD total. Not a bad deal.

And so I came back pretty happy today. I was about to extract the images from the IRIX CDs I downloaded, set them up on dnsmasq’s TFTP server, and get mplayer for IRIX, and watch Strawberry Panic/Mai Otome on the Indy R5K… wait a damn minute, how come I can’t read the files from the CDs at all?

After wasting 3 hours getting IsoBuster and MagicISO (none of which work) I finally learned that SGI had the bright idea to put their pre-XFS filesystem that nobody knows about on the system, EFS. Great. Fortunately, Linux’s kernel will have a solution for that. Right?

Well, yes. In fact there was a module since Linux 2.2 for the EFS filesystem – and better yet, it’s under Miscellaneous Filesystems in the kernel menuconfig. So I fired up my alternate Linux on the encrypted partition, and the other one in VMWare for good measure.

10 hours later, both Linux systems were totally and completely erased from my hard drive. Yes, even the one on the encrypted partition. What happened?

EDIT: Managed to extract something! The IRIX 6.5 install disc was borked though… no wonder it wouldn’t mount. Nero NRG blows balls. Anyway now that I’ve got it down, I’m going to sleep… it’s 0550. Only 16 more hours until the other copy of IRIX 6.5 Installation arrives!

Silicon Graphics Software Release
This CD contains the following products:

nfs3: Network File System Version 3, 6.2 with IMPACT 10000
nfs3: Network File System Version 3, 6.3
nfs: Network File System, 6.2 v1.2
nfs: Network File System, 6.3
nfs: Network File System, 6.4 for Origin, Onyx2, and OCTANE
nfs: Network File System, 6.5
onc3_eoe: ONC3 Execution Environment, 6.2 v1.2
onc3_eoe: ONC3 Execution Environment, 6.3
pcnfsd: PC-NFS 2.0.2 Server Components

You see, compiling the Linux kernel was harder than I thought. Well, not harder than I thought… it just suddenly didn’t want to cooperate after my hundred times compiling the kernel. For Linux in VMWare, I had to rummage around for ages until I finally figured out that I had to include Fusion MPT, whatever the hell that was. Funny how when I searched for Symbios 53c1030 it didn’t show up, although when I went to Fusion MPT there it was, staring at me happily in the face, along with its brothers the 53c1020, 53c1010, and who knows what not (Hint: It’s not funny at all). And get this… when I tried to mount the iso images using the loopback, and with EFS compiled as a module and loaded, the fucking VFAT driver comes up and tries to make sense of the filesystem on the iso images. That’s right, the EFS module didn’t even do its fucking job, which was the whole fucking point of recompiling the kernel in the first fucking place. Worse of all, why the hell was the VFAT driver coming up? What the fuck? Don’t try to be a hero, you just got yourself nuked, shitface.

So I tried going into my secret hideout – the LUKS encrypted supersecret Linux partition on my hard drive (not so secret if you just fdisk it). One thing led to another, and soon I was struggling furiously with this shitty program called mkinitrd (no doubt written by a monkey who was too busy jacking off to pay any attention to coding), which insists on making a gzipped ext2 filesystem image with your modules in it, instead of making a gzipped cpio archive, which the kernel uses. WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF PACKING MY KERNEL MODULES IN A FORMAT THAT THE KERNEL DOES NOT, REPEAT, DOES NOT, RECOGNIZE? The whole debacle wasted another 3 hours of my life, and I was still nowhere closer to getting IRIX 6.5 on my Indy.

And suddenly, up comes my shitty ext3 filesystem telling it can no longer find a superblock on so and so partition.

Fuck you, Linux.