I’m reminded of the time I had a corrupt filesystem image and wanted to uncorrupt it. It turns out you can just read the filesystem specs and follow the data and see exactly what’s gone wrong and where. In this case I only had to change I think one byte before I could successfully mount the filesystem.
The thing that had changed that one byte had also changed many others, so I don’t think I got any value from the recovered filesystem. But I still felt powerful and wizardly in a way that I don’t often, even as a programmer (even running Gentoo Linux on my home computer).
(“Even” makes it sound like I tink programmers are more powerful than others, but I mean more “despite that programming is similar along many axes to this thing”.)
This was a FAT32 filesystem, and I expect a modern filesystem would be a lot harder to do that with, which is a shame. Years later, I also had an unsuccessful attempt to do something similar with an audio file.
I’m reminded of the time I had a corrupt filesystem image and wanted to uncorrupt it. It turns out you can just read the filesystem specs and follow the data and see exactly what’s gone wrong and where. In this case I only had to change I think one byte before I could successfully mount the filesystem.
The thing that had changed that one byte had also changed many others, so I don’t think I got any value from the recovered filesystem. But I still felt powerful and wizardly in a way that I don’t often, even as a programmer (even running Gentoo Linux on my home computer).
(“Even” makes it sound like I tink programmers are more powerful than others, but I mean more “despite that programming is similar along many axes to this thing”.)
This was a FAT32 filesystem, and I expect a modern filesystem would be a lot harder to do that with, which is a shame. Years later, I also had an unsuccessful attempt to do something similar with an audio file.