I'm looking for a way to dump raw data from an entire phone or at least the sda block to a PC, using a method other than adb pull.

When I run adb pull /dev/block/sda sdaDump.img, it creates a dump file. To find what I need, I have to search through this raw data using a Hex Editor. If the dump comes from a fully functioning phone, I can usually find what I’m looking for because all the data is still intact.

However, I accidentally wiped the metadata partition on my phone, so the decryption keys/files are gone. Now, because of that, some folders appear empty when checked with TWRP's File Manager, even though the actual files are still there.

If I create a dump now, the raw data in the file won't be the same as when the metadata was present, and those folders weren't showing as empty.

Running adb pull /dev/block/sda sdaDump.img now results in a dump where the Hex Editor shows zeroes (no data) where these files should be.

Is there any alternative method to create a raw data dump of the sda block or entire phone storage, that will capture that data as it is (not empty folders, but the data in them), even if it's encrypted?

I don't want to create the raw data dump onto the phone storage and then transfer it to a PC, but something that works like adb pull, in the sense that it pulls the data from the phone directly onto a PC.

Thanks a lot in advance to everyone!

CPU: 3700X

Motherboard: Aorus B550 Elite

RAM: 8GBx4 Corsair Vengence LPX 3200

GPU: PowerColor 5700XT

PSU: Cooler Master MWE 1050 V2

Built in 2020.

Since last month, my PC started having random reboots and giving 'Machine Check Exception' error, similar to these:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/190mkn0/5950x_whea_error_18_machine_check_exception/

https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/qia2e7/whea_18_critical_error_computer_goes_black_restart/

https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/150m14n/pc_randomly_restarts_whealogger_id_18/

And now from the last 3 days the system doesn't boot. When I power on the computer, all fans start spinning but keyboard and mouse LEDs don't light up. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn't reboot system neither does pressing the power button for few seconds.

I suspect that motherboard has gone kaput and isn't completing or even starting the boot process, which is why keyboard and mouse aren't getting any signal or power from motherboard or why restart or power down functionality is working.

Before the system stopped booting, I was trying to solve the machine check exception error by updating BIOS, updating chipset drivers, changing BIOS settings etc. But now I'm thinking none of it could've helped because the board itself was deteriorating.

Also during that time, I would randomly get display glitches (pic below) which could only be solved by restarting the machine so I was suspecting it might be GPU that was causing the problems.

Sometimes it would show chessboard like pattern. I guess this was also because of some issue with mobo-GPU connection?

Anyway before changing the board is there anything else I can try? Changing it is a pain so I'm trying to avoid that. 😂

So I'm at the start of the game, part when some guards catch Bayek and his son and game crashes, I'm on windows 11 and these are my specs: Intel i5 3470, rx 470 4gb and 8gb ram, I'm pretty sure my pc is good enough for this game since I played it at very high settings and aboht 45 fps average. If someone had same problem please help because I really love this game

I need to ask a small favor from the good people of Lemmy World Community.

In short, I accidentally wiped the metadata partition on my Poco F3 and now I can't boot into the OS and access my data. I have a lot of pictures, videos and other stuff that I would hate to lose, because of a mistake. But all that is still on the phone, I just can't boot the phone to access it.

Thankfully, there is a way to fix this by creating a full backup of the phone with adb, then using a HEX Editor to manually look through that gigantic file and try to find the files that were in that metadata partition.

A huge thanks to bluet33th, a user from XDA Forums, without whom I would be helpless and couldn't do any of this. It might be a bit complicated and manual process, but it is possible. He explained everything in great detail here, so check it out, especially if you are facing the same problem, this will help you tremendously: https://xdaforums.com/t/how-to-recover-data-if-metadata-partition-was-deleted.4686789/

In order to find these files and put them back where they belong, I need your help, because I have to know their names, exact sizes and at least part of their content, so that I can search for it. Because I'm searching for a specific text in a text file that is 128 GB in size.

I have already tried this on another Xiaomi phone, to make sure this procedure works on Xiaomi phones and it does, but that phone had HyperOS with Android 14 and since every phone and android version is probably different, in order to be sure, I need this information specifically for Poco F3 with Android 13.

It doesn't take long, but if you don't have the time to look inside your metadata partition and tell me which files are inside of that partition and their sizes in bytes, you can just make a backup of the metadata partition and sent it to me, and I'll do the rest of the work.

Here are the steps on how to create a backup:

1. Turn on your phone and boot into TWRP, then connect your phone to a PC, type cmd inside Windows search and run cmd, then position cmd into your platform-tools folder (if you flashed your ROM, you should already have the necessary drivers installed for the next steps to work). For example, if your platform-tools folder on Windows is inside C:\platform-tools, all you need to type into cmd is: cd C:\platform-tools

You can also just go inside your platform-tools folder and type cmd in the address bar and the cmd will start already positioned inside that folder.

2. Then type adb devices and you should see your device, if you do, that means that all the drivers are successfully installed and your phone is detected.

3. Type adb pull /dev/block/by-name/metadata

4. After that, you should see a file named metadata inside C:\platform-tools. That is the file that I'm looking for and as you can see, it takes just a few minutes to get it.

You can skip the next steps (5 and 6), but I'll explain them, just in case someone wants to extract these files for themselves, so that you have them in case something like this happens to you. Of course, you can also proceed to extract the files and tell me their names and sizes.

Here is what you need to do:

5. Extract the content of the metadata file, you can use a software like 7-Zip. Go inside that extracted folder, then into vold > metadata_encryption > key

6. Inside of that key folder, you should see a few files. These are the important files and save them somewhere safe in case you ever need them. Since I don't have them anymore, in order to recreate them, I need to know their exact names and sizes in bytes. You can check the size of every individual file by right clicking on the file and choosing Properties. Then look under Size, not Size on disk, and in parenthesis, you should see the size in bytes.

Please, if you could check the size of every file and write down which file has what size. I would really appreciate it.

I'm specifically looking for someone who has a Poco F3 with Android 13 and MIUI, because I'm not sure if HyperOS changed something, so maybe the number of files or their size is different. But feel free to post the information even if you have HyperOS, but please mention that, so that I am aware of it.

Thanks a lot for your help, it really means a great deal.

Years ago I purchased a Google home hub. It is almost exclusively used to play music while I am cooking. First I used Google music or YouTube music (I forget which) then Spotify. I now have left Android and Spotify behind. In the Google home app I do not see an option to use tidal music. And when I try and share audio from my iPhone the hub does not appear on Bluetooth or WiFi devices.

Even when using Spotify I would have to start the music on the hub then open the app on my phone to put on the music I wanted.

Is there a way to keep using the hub? Or should I get another HomePod?

I had cloned my original hard disk installation to SSD using Macrium Reflect. But it caused confusion because they had the same UUID.

My plan is to regularly image the Windows partition to the spare hard disk as a backup in case of SSD failure.

Ok I was copying a bunch of games from one of my Windows drives over to my phone while booted into Linux. And I got this error that says "libmtp error: Could not open source file". Thankfully I was able to copy the files when I was booted into Windows but it would be nice if I could Transfer files from my Windows drives without having to reboot into Windows. Is there a way I can fix this problem.

I think it might have to do with the ntfs file system because I copied one of the files from the phone back to my Desktop which is ext4 and then back to the phone without any issues. I already tried installing ntfs-3g which was already installed on my distro.

I have an old hp pavilion dv6 and I installed windows 7. Then i tried installing Ubuntu 24.04 and the USB wouldn't boot, it just showed "GRUB" in the top left of the screen. I tried with another USB and the same issue emerged. Is this a BIOS issue?

First off, if there is a better place or forum to ask this, I will take suggestions. I haven't gone to any Linux forums because most of the ones I looked at did not want to support anything specifically Windows related, and this is primarily an issue in Windows.

I am using a GPD Win Max 2, a handheld laptop, with a docking station + external graphics card setup. The GPD has 2 USB C ports, one 3.2 and one 4.0. The 4.0 is used by the external graphics card, while the 3.2 is used by the dock. The dock has a 1Gb ethernet port on it, but it does not work in Windows 10 under normal use. All the other ports on the dock are recognized, but the ethernet port never shows up in device manager. But if I boot into Linux and then restart back into Windows, the ethernet port will work then. I don't even have to have the USB dock connected while running Linux. After a hard power cycle and plugging the dock within 5-10 minutes of starting, the ethernet port will be working in Windows.

Other observations and information: -I have a 100Mb USB A ethernet adapter that works in Windows when connected to the dock. I have also tested a 1Gb USB A adapter, and that did not work. It seems 1Gb or higher does not get recognized without going through Linux first. -The ethernet port does work if I use the dock on the 4.0 port instead, but this isn't viable in my use case. I would have assumed it was a limitation of USB C 3.2 until... -I was distro hopping when I discovered this; I had originally written off the ethernet port until I started trying out Linux. This behavior has happened in Pop OS, Garuda, and Fedora. I have not tested to see if this issue exists in Windows 11, nor do I care to. -I already tried contacting GPD's support email about it. They were less than helpful. Left it at "compatibility issue" and would not explain further. I highly recommend not buying any GPD products. This is not the first time I have had hardware issues that went unresolved with them.

Frankly, I would love just to hear an explanation for why this workaround works. I think I would have been a lot less frustrated if it really was just a "compatibility issue" and there was nothing to do besides buy new hardware. The fact that it runs without issue in Linux gives me hope that its something that can be resolved in Windows.

I migrated my wife's PC after a forceful Windows 11 update to Linux. I made a backup of her files by doing an rsync of almost the complete C: drive onto an external drive formatted with exFAT. This was a grave mistake.

After the Linux installation we noticed that several files were missing and older files were back. My current guess is that I was somehow copying from an old snapshot instead of the current state.

I rsynced everything except for the Windows folder. Does anyone know if there is any chance of getting our filea back? Amd what actually happened?

Long story short I was messing around in the terminal and messed up my Linux Mint Installation and now when I boot into Linux I only get a CLI and don't even see the Linux mint logo. I tried to restore to a previous state using Timeshift but it did not work so I ended up taking a live usb and backing up all my important documents to an external drive. I want to just do a fresh installation but unfortunally for me the boot drive is also the same drive I use to boot into Windows (which I am still able to boot into from GRUB). Is there a way I can reinstall the OS without affecting my ability to boot into Windows?

The laptop I'll be recording them with is running Windows 11 Pro.

Not loving the 'Camera' app that comes stock with Windows.

Tried recording just with my cellphone, but ran into issues with audio quality and battery life. I have an old webcam, and just ordered a tiny bluetooth microphone that I'm hoping to either plant near or literally pin onto the prof if they're cool with it.

Not looking for anything fancy... ability to choose both video and audio device, record/pause, and save so that I can upload to YouTube and forward it to the class. (side question... best video format for this?).

Not really familiar with this kind of software... I recall one of my gaming buddies being a fan of OBS Studio, but unsure if that's just on-screen capture for gaming/streaming or if it can do webcam-only too - DL'ing right now to experiment. In the mean time, taking all suggestions!

Thanks, all!

Edit -

Took about 5 mins to get all the shit on my wishlist figured out in OBS (https://obsproject.com/), and if my dumb ass can figure it out that quick, that is some GOOD software!! Kinda wish I'd have tried first before asking, but was not expecting it to be that easy. I'll leave the thread up just incase its helpful for someone else later.

I'm looking to sell my laptop. I've used stuff like DBAN before but that nukes the whole drive obviously. Is there any good way to leave the OS intact after a reset but also make sure that there's no recoverable data?

Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks!

Edit to add: I don't have the product key for the pre installed Windows 10 OS. Maybe there's a way to recover that and reinstall after a full wipe?

Follow-up to this thread - this is way more specific, so hopefully worthy of its own thread. I think wildcards are the best option for my skill level (basically none), and have gotten a good chunk of what I wanted to accomplish done with those.

An issue I've run into and can't seem to google my way out is making TTS pronounce acronyms in a sensible way. For example "PACU" (post-anesthesia care unit) is usually vocalized as "pack-you" but my TTS software likes to say things like "pace-uh". Or "PO" (latin abbreviation for 'by mouth') is vocalized by just saying the letters, but TTS says "Poe". Stuff like that.

When the TTS comes across a capitol letter with a space on either side, it just pronounces the letter, so I'd still lose things like "pack-you" but at least hearing it spell out "pee ay see you" would make sense, vs "pace-uh" which is gibberish and confusing at high playback speeds.

Best I've come up with so far is <([A-Z]{2})> on the Find side, but that's only spotting the two character terms like PO, and ignoring the longer ones... I'd hoped it would see PACU and detect PA, AC, and CU as three distinct sets of two that could cobbled into "P A C U".

Nothing I've done on the Replace side comes close to working. It either does nothing at all, or it'll do something like turn "PO" into <([A- Z]{2})>. Not sure if preserving the original characters is something A-Z is actually capable of - seems not, but I'm kind of an idiot with stuff like this, so any tips would be appreciated!

Thank you!

Nursing student here!

So we get a shit load of reading assignments, and since everything's digital nowadays, I've been leaning a lot on text-to-speech software that effectively converts reading assignments to listening assignments.

The problem is textbooks have a LOT of just... noise. Every image has something like "FIGURE 13.5 SURGICAL DISASTERS!" "FIGURE 13.6 YOU GOT SUMMONED TO COURT!" etc. In-text citations are EVERYWHERE, copyright info is EVERYWHERE... reading the content, you just skip over all that crap, but pasting it into a TTS service, all that trash gets spoken aloud and adds up to a huge time sink every chapter, and distracts from the actual lesson.

Googling it, the best I've been able to come up with is doing a find and replace in MS word for things like FIGURE **.*^13 with wildcards on and the replace field blank... but it's not very consistent - sometimes it works, sometimes not. Same with nuking parenthesis and the text within with \(*\)

All that said, I'm wondering if I'm approaching this wrong by using MS word in the first place. Would be absolutely amazing if I could save all the commands on standby, then run them at the same time. By end of the school program, we're talking like 100 chapters from multiple books, so anything that lets me just nuke huge batches of BS as quickly as possible and dive right into the listening would be a godsend.

Thanks all!!

Hello there,

First of all; I am sorry if I am using the wrong community - and sorry for any n00bshow regarding this post since I have not done this before.

Background: To my utter delight, I found a podcast on archive.org that I have been searching for. I have succesfully downloaded all audio files listed under "VBR MP3 FILES" as a .zip file (and as a torrent), and they will download as .mp3-files. I am on Windows 10 (sorry, I will change) and using Firefox as browser.

Very long story short, a lot of files had parse errors in an ID3 editor (Mp3tag), and I incidently found out that most of the files actually seem to be .m4a-files instead of .mp3.

Nonetheless, all URLs on the podcast's main page show as .mp3-files and will download so if downloaded as a .zip or through torrent. (Or if using Edge, apparantly, which I just tested).

Issue: What is REALLY weird (at least to me) is that if I am right clicking a single link to an episode in Firefox > save link as > my dialog box shows it will save as .m4a-file - which seems to be the correct file type (with no parse errors in Mp3tag) which I naturally would prefer. Screenshot attached.

If been trying to search for an answer my self what is happening, but evidently failed to do so. Does anyone have an answer? And for a bonus; is it possible to batch "save link as"? wget on a Linux machine? downthemall on FF likewise download files as .mp3.

To hopefully reproduce:

1. Downloading first episode "2015.11.01 - #1 – 1. Mosebog, kap. 1, vers 1..mp3" for instance as torrent
2. Download the same episode by manually browsing the episodes with Firefox > click "VBR MP3" under "download options" > right click “2015.11.01 - #1 – 1. Mosebog, kap. 1, vers 1…mp3” > save link as... > it will hopefully download as .m4a.

THANK you very much in advance! Have a good one.

The confirmation page says the order is confirmed but instead of providing tracking information, it has a button that says 'Download Shop to track package'. Obviously I'm not going to do that, but I do want to track my package.

I thought I could at least click the link to see if somewhere in the chain of steps that would normally follow if one were going to download the app, I might glean the tracking number so I can track the package, but unfortunately, the shop app that I refuse to get on principal because of the shady tactics used to coerce people in to downloading it is even worse than I expected because it can't even scam people competently. The download button is supposed to generate some kind of QR code for you phone. I hoped this QR code might actually have embedded the tracking number in it, in which case I could just grab it that way, but it looks as though the QR code is failing to generate, instead I'm seeing what looks like a heavily zoomed in screencapture of a website with home search trolley and account icons and a sentence partially covered up by a swirly arrow logo. I thought it might have been my browser, but it's the same even on Chrome.

I now can't even use the shop app even if I wanted to, because whether I allow it to be installed on my phone or not, there will be no means I can think of where the tracking number can be transmitted to it so, and because the online store hasn't provided a real tracking number I can't do things the normal way either. Anyone know how to get around this? Or at least force the QR code to actually generate so maybe I can extract something useful from it?

Hello everyone,

my neighbor got an old Samsung Tablet with Android 4.1.X, he primarily wants to use it for watching YouTube. Now, the problem is, the YouTube-App needs to be upgraded, but the Play Store says the device is not compatible. I have tried to just load YouTube in the browser, but the page just doesn't seem to load. Any ideas on how to get that running? Thanks in advance!

Has anybody gotten this to work? If I set up multiple MFA devices with my IAM accounts, they all work flawlessly. But if I set up multiple MFA devices with my root account, only the original MFA device works. No matter how carefully I set up and synch a secondary device, it simply will not work with root. As the linked article says, this should be possible with either root or IAM (though in the past this was not the case). Thanks.

I’m open to both online services as well as self hosting. But I’d like it to be low-maintenance.

Ok so I was trying to clone 512gb nvme ssd to my new 2tb drive with clonezilla and it keeps taking me to automatic repair. I unplugged the original drive and replaced it with the new one before booting. I ran a chkdsk both times before cloning.

The first time I cloned the drive i used these settings:

device to device beginer disk to local disk Chose my source and target Skip disk checking -k0 use source partition table

Then I tried these settings:

device to device expert disk to local disk Chose my source and target Left everything as default -k1 Create partition table proportionally

I also plan on partitioning half of the drive so that I can dual boot linux as Window 10 is reaching eol and I don't want anything to do with Windows 11 and I still need Windows for gaming.

Is there is a error from my side or is it down for everyone?

Hello all, I'm trying to flash linux mint to a old thinkpad I'm refurbishing. However, when I go to flash the ISO to the USB, balena etcher throws the following error's

[23381:0729/101159.717484:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 1 times! [23340:0729/101202.577845:ERROR:browser_main_loop.cc(280)] GLib-GObject: invalid cast from 'GtkFileChooserNative' to 'GtkWidget' [23340:0729/101205.337371:ERROR:browser_main_loop.cc(280)] GLib-GObject: ../gobject/gsignal.c:2777: instance '0x37b801188b20' has no handler with id '5761' [23381:0729/101205.693383:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 2 times!

I would like to note I'm flashing this ISO from my main computer running fedora, and I installed balena etcher from an RPM, (Already tried the app image, but it seems that FUSE is acting up).

Thank you in advance!

I have EndeavourOS installed on my X200S. When I power it on it gets past "Welcome to EndeavourOS" but gets stuck around

Starting Bluetooth service...

Or

Starting Network Manager...

I believe it got stuck on a few other spots previously but I can't recall where. The "Drive in use" indicator light stops flashing at this point. At that point the only option as far as I can tell is to press the power button.

I can boot from a USB drive without any issues.

I had updated my computer but I believe I was believe I did a successful reboot after that.

Any suggestions? I can't seem to find a solution online. A lot of the support pages end with them giving up and reinstalling EndeavourOS.

Solution:

My X200S runs Libreboot and apparently that has issues with the current Linux kernel. I created a bootable EndeavourOS USB unlocked the LUKS drive with sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda1/unlockedFolder. Mounted it with sudo mount /dev/mapper/unlockedFolder /mnt. Ran arch-chroot /mnt so I could gain access to the OS. Switched to the LTS kernel using sudo pacman -S linux-lts and edited the grub files to add the -lts.

I originally tried just downgrading the kernel but it caused my WiFi not to work.

The whole issue was quite strange because it would freeze at random parts and even successfully boot at times.

I primarily use external drives (USB flash drives) and cloud storage (PCloud) for active file management and storage but unfortunately the default file delete action is a permanent delete and not a send-to-recycle bin and I have scoured the internet looking for a way to change the delete settings but they only tell you how to permanently delete files. So to prevent future disaster, is there a way to make sure I don't delete things from at least my flash drive, since I believe PCloud has a backup feature.