Restarting can be a pain too.

Recently, I decided to install arch linux on an old laptop my sibling gave to me. I’m not new to Linux, I’ve been running a debian server for a year now and I have tried several VMs with different systems. But this was my first time installing arch without a script, and on bare metal.

Installing arch itself wasn’t that much of an issue, but there was a bigger problem: the PC didn’t recognize the pendrive for boot in UEFI mode. It seemed to work in the regular boot mode, but I didn’t want to use that. I made sure to deactivate safe mode and all the jazz. Sure enough, I could get UEFI boot working.

I install arch, works fine, I reboot. Oops! I didn’t install dhcpcd and I don’t know how to use network manager! No internet, great!

In my infinite wisdom, instead of trying to get NM to work, I decided to instead chroot back into the system and install dhcpcd. But my surprise when… The boot menu didn’t recognize the USB again. I tried switching between UEFI and normal boot modes on the bios and trying again, after all it appeared last time after changing it, right?

“Oh it doesn’t appear… Wait, what’s this? No boot partition found? Oh crap…”

Turns out, by changing the setting on the BIOS I probably deleted the nvram and with it the boot table settings or whatever they’re called. I deleted GRUB.

Alas, as if to repent for my sins, God gave me a nugget of inspiration. I swap the USB drive from the 3.0 port to one of the 2.0 ports on the other side and… It works, first try. The 3.0 port was just old and the connection bad. And I just deleted GRUB for no reason.

Usually, I would’ve installed everything from scratch again, but with newfound confidence, I managed to chroot into the system and regenerate the boot table or whatever (and install dhcpcd). And it worked! I had a working, bootable system, and an internet connection to download more packages.

I don’t know what the moral of the story is I just wanted to share it :)

50/50 chance they believe you.

“Did you make sure it’s plugged in?”

“Of course I did! Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“You mind just checking for me real quick?”

“…”

“Sir?”

“Never mind, it’s working now.”

Then you look at the uptime. 247 days. No longer have you been elevated. Now you’re the vilest of vile. You’re the user that lies. You just say what you think we want to hear, don’t you? Well, now you’re getting put on hold. For as long as your uptime was.

I have a dark secret. I used to have CenturyLink DSL around 5 years ago, and the tech asked me if I had restarted the modem during one of the many stints where I would get bits per second rather than the “10mbps” we were supposed to get

I lied every time. I’m sorry CenturyLink tech support employee, but man did CenturyLink suck, and man am I absolutely sure that it never fixed the issue.

At one point I filed a complaint with the FCC and got a letter from CenturyLink telling me that they knew about the complaint!

My wife’s standing at her company’s IT dept skyrocketed during COVID lockdowns.

Why? Because we were both working from home, and aside from helping her with basic troubleshooting, I also helped her formulate her tickets better.

Turns out, tech support folks like it when a ticket has concise info, instead of “screen broke”.

This also works on IT managers if you say “can we use AI to do that?”.

I will not believe you anyways and reboot just in case.

As someone who’s an IT person I can tell you the vibe is actually, “Well shit, I guess I’m going to actually have to diagnose something.”

Show me how you reboot the PC.

*User turns off monitor

Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I’d torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn’t work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.

He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I’m not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.

I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a “whoa retro.” which hurt me deeply.

How is this about programming?

Edit: Keep on downvoting, I simply asked a question…

“Ok let me check on something”

Uptime: 156 hours

"let’s restart using what I like to call, ‘the right way’ "