Splinters of Dusk :: View Single Post - Regarding the original board style: ashGrunge

pinkgothic · Sparkle

After four hours, I've managed to find, retrieve and upload the old Splinters of Dusk forum logo.

I refer to the sunshine in my life as to background information, before letting you know what took so long:

1 - Boot PC from Win 98 SE CD ROM.
2 - Pick "Boot PC from CD ROM" from the stupid arse menu.
3 - Pick "Boot PC with help of CD ROM" from the second stupid arse menu appearing after five minutes wait time.
4 - Wait for significant files from the CD to be copied into a RAMDISK.
5 - See the DOS command prompt, knowing you have no way of searching the whole disk. But, alas, Neike thinks she knows where things are. Afterall, she was pretty much an order-everything nut when things were still working!
6 - Neike spends about an hour semi-blindly browsing her webdesign folder via MS-DOS. That's with lovely folders like BLOODD~1 (blood.datavibe.net), SPLINT~1 (splinterdusk), and so forth.
7 - Finding a couple of files that might be the logo I used on the old forum, I got out a floppy disk, inserted it, and wiped it.
8 - copy *.GIF B:
9 - Remove disk, insert into laptop, view files.
10 - Damn, not the files. Rinse, wash, repeat with *.JPG.
11 - Damn, not the files. Rinse, wash, repeat with individual *.BMP files (remember, floppies have a capacity of a maximum of 1.4 MB)
12 - Damn, not the files. Rinse, wash, repeat, with increasingly obscure folders.
13 - Desperation sets in. "Would this be the only file I ever permanently deleted?!"
14 - Boyfriend retrieves a Linux boot CD.
15 - Restart computer, boot from CD.
16 - She sees a big screen of lots of options, chews on some of her long hair, and an invisible timer hits zero, and some craptastic Linuxoid starts to boot.
17 - Many, many long minutes later, along with many "OMGWTF! Cannot I/O block N!" where N is a number between 0 and 20, and is probably referring to her nuked C: drive, Neike is prompted to do an anti-virus check. Having no other options, Neike and boyfriend decide, "To hell, might aswell". Bad idea. Using Bit Defender turns out to take a long time and return much bogus information, such as that, allegedly, distributed.net's client includes a trojan, and that mIRC is somehow malware. Other things come up, but the credibility of Bit Defender has gone poof, so it's ignored. Reboot.
18 - In that gibberish menu, Neike and her boyfriend select a couple more things. I'll keep it short - it was a pointless exercise.
19 - Boyfriend wields, wriggling brows, an Ubuntu install disk, and causes Neike to froth at the mouth, not wanting to put her poor computer through such an OS. But the things you'll do to have a harddrive search.
20 - After much (much, much) waiting, Ubuntu boots from CD.
21 - Drives not mounted. Bummer.
22 - Neike tries to mount as she remembers. mount /dev/hdb /media/big
23 - Fails, so Neike tries to make the folder 'big' in media.
24 - Fails, so boyfriend says, "prefix that with 'sudo', you're not root".
25 - Insert long discussion about the point of being logged in as some predefined user called "ubuntu" instead of "root" if you can work around that by using "sudo".
26 - End of discussion. Neike does a websearch on her laptop and finds the "Absolute Beginners" board on the Ubuntu support/community forum, which she copies the commands word for word out of. Turns out this strange file, "fstab", needs to have a line or two about the mounts. Fine. Whatever. Linux sucks.
27 - One mount later, the huge ass harddrive is available for searching!
28 - A search for 'ashGrunge' results in a terribly scarce result set - or rather, about ten folders, all of which contain backups of individual ashGrunge files. Figures.
29 - A search for logo.gif takes ages. Finally, a gallery of results! Squat in the middle, the file.

You'd think it'd be over here, right? Wrong. Now, the fun began!

30 - Take floppy.
31 - Insert floppy.
32 - Try to mount floppy.
33 - Fail.
34 - Look on the internet for a fstab entry that might be missing.
35 - Fail.
36 - Give up on the floppy.
37 - Take USB stick.
38 - Insert USB stick.
39 - Try to mount USB stick.
40 - Fail.
41 - Look on the internet for a fstab entry that might be missing.
42 - Fail! Again!
43 - Open FireFucker.
44 - Get a connection. Wow, first hint of a smile!
45 - Go to gmail.com
46 - Login.
47 - Get a really, really laggy computer.
48 - Go to search results.
49 - Right click on "logo.gif"
50 - Wait.
51 - Wait.
52 - Wait.
53 - Boyfriend gets sick of waiting and makes the mistake to click on a few program tabs.
54 - Wait.
55 - Wait.
56 - Wait.
57 - After several long minutes, the programs open, and after several long minutes after clicking [X], they close.
58 - Look at the properties of logo.gif.
59 - Fume over that the path is long, and ends in "...". Thanks, Linux. That's exactly the bit I happen to need, you arsehole.
60 - Open the file in FireFucker.
61 - Wait. A really long time.
62 - File opens, path displays. A copy later, it's in the clipboard.
63 - Move back to the gmail tab.
64 - Get a couple of "OMGWTF PROGRAM NUKED ITSELF!" dialogues.
65 - Forcibly close programs.
66 - Lose taskbar.
67 - Copy path of logo.gif into Notepad on laptop, because if things are dying, they typically die completely. Yes, even in Linux. Yes, I have experience with this sort of thing.
68 - Surprisingly, things still work, but they're no faster than before.
69 - An upload and self-send later, gmail has the "logo.gif" in its inbox.
70 - Retrieve file from gmail via laptop.
71 - Drag & drop into FTP folder (on laptop).
72 - End.