What I did on my vacation from reality

I have three laptops right now. An IBM Thinkpad A50m (”crossbone” (or “bones”), which has never steered me wrong — it was unhappy with its hard drive earlier this morning, so I booted with init=/bin/sh, ran e2fsck with badblocks, rebooted, and it’s been chugging along all day per usual), a Compaq Presario V5000 (”widget”, Marie’s laptop, which has some issues), and a Toshiba Satellite which I’m too lazy to put down my cig and go look at to get a model number off of.

The Satellite isn’t actually mine, I’m just fixing it for a corporal of Marines.

Here’s the deal. The laptop got hit relatively badly with a virus not too long ago — alright, a while ago, I just suck at scheduling my time to fix things — and required a scrub and reinstallation, which is done. Now there’s a giant freakin’ tarball of backups living on the hard drive which needs to get unpacked. Not even a tar.bz2, which I originally thought it was; Vissago didn’t add the “j” flag, or I didn’t, when the tarball was created.

Option one: Winzip. Says everything is okay, but seems to fail silently on megalarge tarballs.

Option two: USB flash drive booting Linux and writing to an NTFS partition. Uhm… yeah, about that. NTFS write support is still flakey.

Option three: Cygwin. (Google it.) Fails with something about a queue.

Option four: fun with smbclient. Well, I keep dicking with the Windows firewall, and it keeps insisting in the “security center” that it’s on, even though I keep turning it off, turning it off for the wireless net, unrestricting certain ports, and all sorts of other fun stuff. I’ve been hunting the antivirus’s firewall, but it’s proving hard to track down.

Option five: external USB drive enclosure. Well, I kind of dicked this one up myself. I bought a compressed IDE enclosure instead of a SATA one, because I’m stupid and guessed wrong (I’m used to dealing with old-to-ancient hardware), and I refuse to return it because I know how damned useful they can be (when you deal with lots of old-to-ancient hardware). If I could snarf the right one, I’d be in a lot better shape.

So, my dilemma. I have a very large tarball that needs to be unpacked. Cygwin can’t do it, Winzip can’t do it, the USB stick can’t hold it, I don’t feel like dicking with smbclient, and my USB enclosure is incompatible.

I’m about to do some scary things with Perl.

Update: I ended up getting everything out. It seems that a combination of Cygnus and Winzip saved the day.