Mastodawn

does the USB stack not come up in the first 15 seconds of power on?

AHHHHHHH IT STOPPED AT 21 OF 22GB

I finally got a version of the recovery disk downloaded, and it boots.
It tries to recover to a version of windows 10 that's not terribly useful, but I think now that I have a working recovery disk, I can munge that disk into a windows 11 recovery disk

hey microsoft you could have made this migration go a lot smoother if you'd just told your recovery-image-generating-tool how to make win11 disks

wait can I just lie to it that I have a Surface Hub 3 and it'll do that?

NOPE it tries to give me MTR

updating this thing is mainly a nightmare because the only updates I've managed to at all get working are the ones from the Surface IT Tool and it can't download most of the images because microsoft is storing the images on a server that someone reboots every 10 minutes or something

microsoft, you know that resuming HTTP downloads has been a solved problem since, uh, 1997?

It's a 22gb file and it can go as fast as half a gigabit/s but it keeps just hanging at like 14gb in. Your only option is to cancel and try again, which starts from byte 0

they mention this might be a problem in one of the many FAQs, and they recommend you fix it by getting better internet

I should MITM myself and see if I can figure out where it's downloading these files, and just curl it

https://surfacerecoverytool.download.prss.microsoft.com/dbazure/download/SurfaceHub3_BMR_155000_2023.815.94.zip

got it.

I'd be tempted to launch my win95 VM ad use GetRight to download it, but I imagine it'd have some issues with TLS and certificates and such

oh right I need to install TCP/IP onto my windows 95 machine first

lemme find my win95 floppies

Nah, MS won't let you download the file over HTTP, and this version of GetRight from 1997 doesn't support HTTPS.

the curl download failed with a connection reset after 17 minutes and 20gb!

so I tell curl to resume it, and... the server starts over from the beginning.

MICROSOFT'S STUPID SERVER DOESN'T SUPPORT THE RANGE HEADER

IT'S 2026 BUY A REAL COMPUTER

anger canceled, I was just misreading curl. it did resume.

so again, why doesn't microsoft's official tool do this?

anyway I have the file now. There's a metadata JSON file that I don't have, but it looks very fakable. Then I can use the official recovery tool to build me a bootable USB drive, like it's supposed to be able to do

FUN FACT: the Surface IT Tool doesn't seem to validate any of the windows version info you give it in the JSON file!

yeah no it just failed verification. So I'm just going to try to download it, again, and again, and again, until I get lucky

it already hung

currently on attempt #8

#7 made it to 17gb (of 22gb)!

slightly tempted to automate it. watch the screen for the visible download amount, and if it hasn't changed in Xty seconds, hit cancel, restart.

cross your fingers, we're at 19gb and still climbing at 76 Mbps!

21gb!!!!

OH MY GOD ARE YOU SERIOUSLY DOING THIS, MICROSOFT

bad idea: I already MITM'd this once.

I download the file with curl and stick it on a local fast server. Then I set up mitmproxy to silently rewrite requests to their shitty server to my local one, which will be an actual server that works and doesn't randomly drop connections once out of EVERY FUCKING TIME

annoyingly I already deleted the file I downloaded earlier.

(I'm juggling laserdisc archival files right now, so my laptop has a VERY full hard drive, and I thought I was done with that file when it failed verification)

my first attempt and curling it stalled at 16mb.

not gigabytes, megabytes.

hey microsoft could I mail you some blank floppies and you just return 'em with the file on it? that might be easier at this point

my best guess for what is happening: I'm getting randomly loadbalanced onto a bunch of very overloaded servers.

I have downloaded the file and I'm now copying it onto my local server.

why didn't I just download it on my local server in the first place, so I wouldn't have to copy it across my house's network?

good question.

okay the files all moved locally so I can just make mitmproxy point it at the different URL. but I think I have been screaming at this problem enough for one day, so I'm going to stop for tonight.

the surface hub has not defeated me yet, I fight on

I lied. mitmproxy is now redirected to my local server, and Surface IT Tool is downloading from it.

annoyingly slowly, actually. Only 51Mbps? this is 22gb!

(it's probably because mitmproxy is handling all the bytes instead of letting nginx do it)

okay I have made a recovery disk by using the MITM download hack

how much do you want to bet this thing won't even boot?