Chronicals of the Healing Cat

We made a tumblr post about this but I suppose we should adapt it for here if we're gonna be usin' it. This is long, we're sorry. TL;DR: Don't buy "Onn." flash drives. They suck.

First off, healing cat? Medicat. Yeah, that Medicat.

Anyways, for the past week, we've been trying to install it for, well, PC repair. And I suppose as a little backup accessor for our online stuff if we happen to loose our devices, as a side benefit (portable apps may be weird and hacky, but damn is it cool as fuck). First, we tried on a 32 GiB SanDisk Cruzer, which, worked actually! It's nice, buuuuut, also, medicat left only 3.7 GiB(/GB? See, nobody specifies if it's GB or GiB, usually they mean the latter, but "i" (or, "-ibbyte") variants mean 1024 bytes and so on rather than 1000) on the drive, the addition of a NixOS image to repair our workstation (because, who do you know has a copy of NixOS 23.11 Tapir install media on hand? Well, actually, you know now, us, but, besides us?), and the failed attempt of installing KeePassXC portable (added via copying the contents of the portable zip from the project's download instead of (and, I didn't know this at the time) installing via the PortableApps launcher, I'm left with 95.5 MiB free. This is NTFS, it has a journal lmao, I need some free space + that is certainly not enough to add a windows 10 and/or 11 install image. (Yeah... we work with both, it's a pain. Hell, even some win 7 from time to time.)

So, I turned to the "great" (you'll see why quotes in a bit) resource that is Walmart to get a 64 G(i)B, USB 3.0 flash drive. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of money, so I got the cheapest one they had, one by "Onn.", which, is basically the Amazon Basics of Walmart (like insignia is by Best Buy, actually exactly like Insignia tbh). This was a mistake. (Also, I'm aware there's an approved drives list, but, you get what you can. I'll be going and getting a trusted drive after this.)

Last time, I didn't have a great deal of luck with the install script on windows. Maybe it's windows 11 being win 11, or a weird thing about my system (after all, I did add explorer patcher and rectify 11), but I did eventually end up with a working medicat install.

So I manually installed from the get-go, I installed ventoy, I formated the first partition as NTFS, renamed it "Medicat v21.12 mit ISOs" and started the 7z extraction which... worked actually. I had already planned to test out my newly constructed security circumvention repair disk and, well, used it! Oddly... the mini windows 10 didn't boot properly. Got stuck at the loading dots. So, I had to use the lockpick wim (thank you Jayro for including that as a separate image, saved my ass here), and, despite password setting not working, I was able to clear the password. Works well enough for me, so in I go all is well, I boot into windows 11, and it mounts the Medicat disk just fine.

I then try to add KeePassXC to it because having access to our online accounts was sortof a requirement. I run Start.exe to start the PortableApps menu and all is well until I actually try to install an app. I asks me to update, I say, "Sure", and it... fails? I then head over to the PortableApps website, download the installer (which is what the Medicat PA install was trying to download) and KeePassXC since I'm going to be doing manual installs and that also fails.

I run the installer manually (.paf.exe is just .exe) and it "succeeds" but also now Start.exe is fucked. "Great," I said in headspace, "what now?"

I elected to just... reinstall Medicat. This fucked up so bad, I... heh, NTFS was dying (writing wasn't working), so I tried to reformat. Windows rejected my attempt to format the drive. Mind you, this was with Explorer's formatting tools, because Disk Management refused to let me use any options in the context menu for any partition on that drive at all. (*Sigh*, Windows, why do you suck at partitioning? Why is macOS, which treats its users more like idiots than you do, better at partitioning a disk using MBR, not GPT, which you, personally, are using right now than you? Linux I get, it's great for this, I love GParted, best tool on earth. But, really?)

Anyways, so I go under linux, surprise, ventoy is in nixpkgs, so I can just, like, use it, I try the install script, it works, but the extraction fails. Not fully, no, some files did make it on, but others just... threw I/O errors. What's an I/O error (error number 5)? Means something's fucked up with the filesystem. So I did it manually, again and again, I wrote all zeroes to the drive with dd (yes, this is possible, also dangerous as hell, I almost over wrote my good external SSD, but if you need it, the command is sudo dd if=/dev/zero of={{some device}} status=progress, this'll just write 0x00 to said device; it'll also give you progress in completion, how nice :3) , had mkfs.ntfs do the same, and still, I kept getting errors.

I tried using exFAT because, tbh, this is a repair drive, why do we need NTFS again? That's besides the point, files were still getting corrupted. Usually around the PortableApps folder (which is why it corrupted when I tried updating), but I assume this is why mini windows 10 didn't want to boot as well since lockpick worked just fine (despite being also from Jayro, despite also being windows PE, edit: windows 11 PE, but still PE).

This was with a fresh torrent of the source zip too, like, yeahhhhhhh.

I'm gonna return that drive. It's been reformated to exFAT like it came when I got it, hoping that at least the first 200 MiB are fine lmao.