So I've recently been finally getting around to something I've wanted to do for a few years: switching to Linux.

To safely test out this process before applying it to my main tower machine, I decided to first do the switch over on an old Mac Mini which had a lot to gain from this as it was stuck on an outdated and unsupported version of MacOS.

But of course this all involved shuffling around a lot of old data and making sure everything was backed up. And here's where the story begins.

I backed up the Mini's MacOS install to its own partition on an external backup drive shared by my Windows tower machine. Once done, I shrank it to only the used size( which was complicated in its own right for reasons I'll explain shortly,) and then wanted to move it to the end of the drive so I could expand the Windows partition back out to fill the unused space.

Problem #1: MacOS's Disk Utility is so stripped down and lacking in functionality in the name of gloss, it literally cannot work with unallocated space on a drive in any way. You cannot see unallocated space, and you cannot create it. Want to shrink or delete a partition? It automatically creates a new one to fill the space whether you wanted it or not. Want to make a new partition in unallocated space without wiping the whole drive? Gotta use a different OS to make a dummy partition first and then replace it in Disk Utility. And the real problem… Want to move a partition? Can't.

Problem #2: Windows's Disk Management doesn't know what HFS+ is and refuses to work with it. Windows can't even read the Mac backup partition, let alone move it. But wait! I can use EaseUS Partition Manager! …Aaand most of its essential functionality is locked behind one of its multiple paywall tiers, including the ability to work with non-Windows filesystems at all.

But what about that new Linux install on the Mini?

I run 'sudo apt-get install gparted', a FOSS program, and in less than a minute I've already got it moving the partition. No hassle. No BS.

And if this whole thing doesn't just sum up the operating system trio, I don't know what does.

Now unfortunately there's an unhappy part two to this story.

After GParted finished its 13 HOUR move operation, I switch the drive back over to my tower machine so it could expand its own partition.

Problem #3: WTF is this!?

The partitions were all screwed up! The NFTS volume was the wrong size, a fraction of what it was supposed to be! The HFS+ volume was the right size, but in the wrong place! There were two adjacent but distinct "unallocated" spaces, one of which appeared unformattable! GParted, what did you do!?

Switching back to Linux reveals the truth… Everything is fine, actually. The partitions are exactly how they should be, and all the files in them are intact and fully readable. Windows is just stupid.

I agonize over this for hours, doing countless web searches all turning up not a single helpful bit of info. Apparently nobody has ever had this happen before. Figures. It seems like a simple enough issue: Windows is wrong; the problem is it's obstinately wrong and cannot be corrected.

Uggggggghhhh. Fine. I wipe the entire drive and start backing everything up to it all over again.

The moral of the story is Windows wasted two continuous days of my life. Fuck Windows. XD

I'm going to fucking scream.

It did it again. Any use of GParted on the disk causes it to read completely wrong in Windows. WHY ARE THERE NO OTHER REPORTS OF THIS!?

I have to first find a way to even back everything up, and then actually do it FOR THE THIRD TIME.

Well I found out more precisely what's happening here and proved it's reproducible. I still have no idea why it's happening or how to fix it after it does happen aside from wiping the entire disk, but oh well.

What's going on here is any time GParted edits the disk, Windows from then on is convinced it's MBR when it's actually GPT. All options to convert it to GPT are unavailable, with even third-party software citing a nonspecific partition table error. The disk can't even be wiped via Disk Management once it's like this; you have to use the CLI utility 'diskpart'.

So I guess Windows is just a brat and doesn't want any other dirty operating system touching its toys. Note that the reason I'm not pinning any blame on GParted for this is that LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE reads the drive correctly. So uhh...

TL;DR PSA: Don't use GParted on drives you intend to use with Windows, because Windows is stupid.

I'm hoping someone can correct me and tell me I'm somehow doing something wrong. I don't want to be an alarmist, and even after knowing what was happening I couldn't find even a single search result online of anyone else encountering this, but if I can save even one person's less-replacable-than-mine data it will be worth getting more eyes on this.

Well I hope the rest of your installation goes/went well!

Windows do be windows, so I’m not surprised it would do something like this, but maybe gparted has some way to be windows-compatible? Idk

What distro did you end up going with?

I can tell it’s (probably) Debian-based with the use of `apt`

Thank you! The rest of the process has been a breeze and honestly delightful. I felt like I was using a proper operating system for the first time in my life. And I say that as someone who grew up with Windows 98, XP, and 7, and MacOS… probably 7 and newer?

I've been hoping someone with more knowledge might come out of the weeds and tell me I missed a setting or something, but the complete lack of any other reports of this problem online means it's probably yet another case of technology acting anomalous around me. Technical issues with no search results are something I'm well used to. :P

I went with Linux Mint for my distro because of its ease of use coming from other OSes, and because I have an old 32-bit machine I'd like to try installing LMDE on at some point.

Sorry to say I'm using Cinnamon and not GNOME. :) I would like to do a deeper dive into a few more DEs at some point though, before I pick one out for my tower machine.

Mint cinnamon is pretty much *the* suggestion for people coming from windows (and without a sole gaming focus), so it’s a great choice!

The world of desktop environments is large and diverse, with options ranging from KDE Plasma (more windows-like in general vibe) and GNOME (mac-ish in the same general way, also my least favorite) to XFCE (customizable and with less bloat than the others I’d say)

If you’re looking for something even more customizable, I’d suggest looking into (tiling/scrolling/floating) window managers like i3 (the classic) or Hyprland (my favorite)

Sadly I’m not a gparted expert or anything of the sort, but I like to think that I have a good amount of general knowledge on Linux systems and switching from windows. I made the switch myself semi-recently and dove right into Arch, installing pretty much everything manually and totally not fucking up my entire OS like twelve times in the process

I can’t wait for another person to make the switch and learn more about it, whether you dive into the details of customizing everything or are fulfilled with an out of the box experience!

Hope you have fun with this :3

hi - so, i don't have an actual solution to your problem right off the bat, but i do have a long history of trying (often unsuccessfully) to get Windows and Linux to coexist in one way or another. usually Linux is happy to work with Windows, but i've never had a good time as soon as i needed the opposite.

while i can't solve your exact problem, i can give you some places to look for a solution and some possible other approaches you can try.

option zero - a completely uninformed guess at something that could be the problem:

something i've noticed, but not looked into enough to tell you why, is that Windows seems to prefer having unallocated space in particular places on a drive, like 1MB at the beginning of the partition scheme, sometimes some in between partitions. something deep in my memory is saying this has to do with MBR vs. GPT schemes, and so wouldn't be relevant anymore, but just the other day i had to fuck around a bunch to make a Windows boot usb for a pc i'm building for a friend, and the tool i found that finally did the trick put a 1MB unallocated space at the beginning of the usb... go figure. all i'm saying is that if it were me, i might look closely at places that mention things like this, because in general Windows laughs at universal standard compliance, and cannot be trusted to follow the rules that any other OS does.

option one - change your search parameters:

you may have already tried this avenue, but the first thing i thought of is that your problem sounds like the kinds of things one often runs into when trying to dual-boot. i couldn't entirely understand if that's actually what you were trying to do, or if you just wanted to view/edit/access drives and partitions from various OS'es, but i think some of the problems may be the same regardless.

if one takes a look at the Arch Linux Wiki page on dual-booting with Windows, it immediately becomes apparent that Windows hates the mere idea of sharing its drive with anything else. Windows has a uniquely unhinged way of handling booting and disk management in general. it loves to be completely opaque on what its doing and why, with lots of names that don't describe what the actual thing is ("scan and fix this drive", "secure boot", etc.). at the same time, it has some unflinchingly rigid expectations for how partitions are laid out, and will flat out refuse to even partially support any other setup. i would recommend looking through that Arch Wiki page and doing some searches on dual-booting to get some ideas of what Windows expects and how to set things up that way.

option two - change your partitioning tool:

i love love GParted. it was the very first thing i ever used back when i first installed Ubuntu 8.04 in 2008. it's approachable, informative without being draconian, and, for the most part, it Just Works (tm). it does, however, make a few guesses behind the scenes at how things should be set up from time to time, as a necessary cost to make it accessible to more users.

to make sure you're actually doing what you want to do, i'd recommend trying to boot into Linux and using a different tool to do your partitioning. specifically, i would recommend using fdisk. fdisk has a terminal ui ("cfdisk"), and if you're coming from a gui like GParted, its going to be a fairly similar experience.

it's a smidge more advanced, and you're going to have to jump into the terminal (i don't know your familiarity with Linux, so i don't want to assume you're comfortable with the terminal), but it will give you a better idea of whether GParted is doing something weird or if the problem lies elsewhere.

it's important to note that cfdisk doesn't create any filesystems if you create a partition with it. for that, you'll have to use mkfs after the partitions are created. it's more terminal work, but if you manage to make the partitions with cfdisk, it should be fairly straightforward.

option three - i'm a linux user, you knew this one was coming

dump that sucker. or - at least - silo your computers. this experience might be a good excuse to ask "why am i trying to make this work? in the future, is it likely to become easier or harder to make Windows play nicely with Linux/OSX?"

i don't know your financial situation or current access to computers, or even what use case you have for Windows vs. other operating systems, so i don't want to come across as preachy or as evangelical here. you know your needs best, and i'm the last person who should be telling anyone not to hammer away at a problem that i seem to be the only one in the universe that cares about, that's how i spend many evenings.

with that said, my life got a lot easier when i decided to just have a separate little computer for Linux. i bought a cheap used NUC, and later upgraded it to a better mini-pc. since then i have completely ditched Windows (the straw for me was Recall, but I already had one foot out the door for a few years prior). the experience i gained trying to daily drive for a bit with the mini-pc gave me the confidence to take that step. i haven't looked back at all.

---

whew. hope something in there turns out to be helpful.

if you need to copy files from Windows drives or do anything else concrete in order to be comfortable switching fully, and want to reach out for help or with questions, please feel free to hit me up! :^)

Thank you for the thorough reply! I'll go through this in itemized order.

In response to guess at the problem:

I think you're right about this. I noticed the same thing as I was reformatting the drive multiple times. Windows kept generating that 1MB space at the start which depending on the operating system looking at it sometimes showed up as unallocated, sometimes as an unidentified partition, and sometimes not showing up at all on that OS. The drive's configuration right after the first screwup also had strange gaps between the partitions. This is why each time I had to reset it, I let Windows do the initial formatting; I knew it had its own secret procedures it was picky about.

In response to search suggestions:

I deliberately ignored and tried to filter out results related to dual booting, as this is a backup drive simply storing files and I thought those results would contain a lot of problems and fixes that wouldn't apply to my case. Maybe a mistake in hindsight, but a choice made for efficiency in finding what I needed.

In response to fdisk suggestion:

I've always been wary of CLI, to tell you the truth. Especially when doing something potentially dangerous if screwed up, I'm always paranoid that I'll have missed some info or mistyped something. I'll keep your suggestion in mind for the future though! It's not like I didn't use diskpart multiple times during this process, from a computer with much more precious drive contents.

In response to urge to ditch Windows:

That's the plan! Especially because Win10's EoL is rapidly approaching and even if my machine were supported by Spyware11 I wouldn't want it. But with how much I use my Windows machine for currently and the sheer amount of files that need to be sorted out, it's going to be a long process. The Mac Mini was the testing ground, and it revealed just how difficult migrating my tower machine might be. I think I'm going to need more external storage to pull off The Great Data Shuffle.

As for the situation described in my original post: The resolution of that is currently that I've simply given up on backing up the Mini's MacOS install until I can get a new external drive for the Mini's two OSes to share. Not a comfortable situation, but it did already have some old backups stored on one of its own drives, and between the two computers… I absolutely needed my tower machine to have a safety net.

Again thank you for the advice! It's good to have support on the road to a fully Linux desk! :3

So I've recently been finally getting around to something I've wanted to do for a few years: switching to Linux.

To safely test out this process before applying it to my main tower machine, I decided to first do the switch over on an old Mac Mini which had a lot to gain from this as it was stuck on an outdated and unsupported version of MacOS.

But of course this all involved shuffling around a lot of old data and making sure everything was backed up. And here's where the story begins.

I backed up the Mini's MacOS install to its own partition on an external backup drive shared by my Windows tower machine. Once done, I shrank it to only the used size( which was complicated in its own right for reasons I'll explain shortly,) and then wanted to move it to the end of the drive so I could expand the Windows partition back out to fill the unused space.

Problem #1: MacOS's Disk Utility is so stripped down and lacking in functionality in the name of gloss, it literally cannot work with unallocated space on a drive in any way. You cannot see unallocated space, and you cannot create it. Want to shrink or delete a partition? It automatically creates a new one to fill the space whether you wanted it or not. Want to make a new partition in unallocated space without wiping the whole drive? Gotta use a different OS to make a dummy partition first and then replace it in Disk Utility. And the real problem… Want to move a partition? Can't.

Problem #2: Windows's Disk Management doesn't know what HFS+ is and refuses to work with it. Windows can't even read the Mac backup partition, let alone move it. But wait! I can use EaseUS Partition Manager! …Aaand most of its essential functionality is locked behind one of its multiple paywall tiers, including the ability to work with non-Windows filesystems at all.

But what about that new Linux install on the Mini?

I run 'sudo apt-get install gparted', a FOSS program, and in less than a minute I've already got it moving the partition. No hassle. No BS.

And if this whole thing doesn't just sum up the operating system trio, I don't know what does.

Now unfortunately there's an unhappy part two to this story.

After GParted finished its 13 HOUR move operation, I switch the drive back over to my tower machine so it could expand its own partition.

Problem #3: WTF is this!?

The partitions were all screwed up! The NFTS volume was the wrong size, a fraction of what it was supposed to be! The HFS+ volume was the right size, but in the wrong place! There were two adjacent but distinct "unallocated" spaces, one of which appeared unformattable! GParted, what did you do!?

Switching back to Linux reveals the truth… Everything is fine, actually. The partitions are exactly how they should be, and all the files in them are intact and fully readable. Windows is just stupid.

I agonize over this for hours, doing countless web searches all turning up not a single helpful bit of info. Apparently nobody has ever had this happen before. Figures. It seems like a simple enough issue: Windows is wrong; the problem is it's obstinately wrong and cannot be corrected.

Uggggggghhhh. Fine. I wipe the entire drive and start backing everything up to it all over again.

The moral of the story is Windows wasted two continuous days of my life. Fuck Windows. XD

I'm going to fucking scream.

It did it again. Any use of GParted on the disk causes it to read completely wrong in Windows. WHY ARE THERE NO OTHER REPORTS OF THIS!?

I have to first find a way to even back everything up, and then actually do it FOR THE THIRD TIME.

Well I found out more precisely what's happening here and proved it's reproducible. I still have no idea why it's happening or how to fix it after it does happen aside from wiping the entire disk, but oh well.

What's going on here is any time GParted edits the disk, Windows from then on is convinced it's MBR when it's actually GPT. All options to convert it to GPT are unavailable, with even third-party software citing a nonspecific partition table error. The disk can't even be wiped via Disk Management once it's like this; you have to use the CLI utility 'diskpart'.

So I guess Windows is just a brat and doesn't want any other dirty operating system touching its toys. Note that the reason I'm not pinning any blame on GParted for this is that LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE reads the drive correctly. So uhh...

TL;DR PSA: Don't use GParted on drives you intend to use with Windows, because Windows is stupid.

I'm hoping someone can correct me and tell me I'm somehow doing something wrong. I don't want to be an alarmist, and even after knowing what was happening I couldn't find even a single search result online of anyone else encountering this, but if I can save even one person's less-replacable-than-mine data it will be worth getting more eyes on this.

Well I hope the rest of your installation goes/went well!

Windows do be windows, so I’m not surprised it would do something like this, but maybe gparted has some way to be windows-compatible? Idk

What distro did you end up going with?

I can tell it’s (probably) Debian-based with the use of `apt`

Thank you! The rest of the process has been a breeze and honestly delightful. I felt like I was using a proper operating system for the first time in my life. And I say that as someone who grew up with Windows 98, XP, and 7, and MacOS… probably 7 and newer?

I've been hoping someone with more knowledge might come out of the weeds and tell me I missed a setting or something, but the complete lack of any other reports of this problem online means it's probably yet another case of technology acting anomalous around me. Technical issues with no search results are something I'm well used to. :P

I went with Linux Mint for my distro because of its ease of use coming from other OSes, and because I have an old 32-bit machine I'd like to try installing LMDE on at some point.

Sorry to say I'm using Cinnamon and not GNOME. :) I would like to do a deeper dive into a few more DEs at some point though, before I pick one out for my tower machine.

So I've recently been finally getting around to something I've wanted to do for a few years: switching to Linux.

To safely test out this process before applying it to my main tower machine, I decided to first do the switch over on an old Mac Mini which had a lot to gain from this as it was stuck on an outdated and unsupported version of MacOS.

But of course this all involved shuffling around a lot of old data and making sure everything was backed up. And here's where the story begins.

I backed up the Mini's MacOS install to its own partition on an external backup drive shared by my Windows tower machine. Once done, I shrank it to only the used size( which was complicated in its own right for reasons I'll explain shortly,) and then wanted to move it to the end of the drive so I could expand the Windows partition back out to fill the unused space.

Problem #1: MacOS's Disk Utility is so stripped down and lacking in functionality in the name of gloss, it literally cannot work with unallocated space on a drive in any way. You cannot see unallocated space, and you cannot create it. Want to shrink or delete a partition? It automatically creates a new one to fill the space whether you wanted it or not. Want to make a new partition in unallocated space without wiping the whole drive? Gotta use a different OS to make a dummy partition first and then replace it in Disk Utility. And the real problem… Want to move a partition? Can't.

Problem #2: Windows's Disk Management doesn't know what HFS+ is and refuses to work with it. Windows can't even read the Mac backup partition, let alone move it. But wait! I can use EaseUS Partition Manager! …Aaand most of its essential functionality is locked behind one of its multiple paywall tiers, including the ability to work with non-Windows filesystems at all.

But what about that new Linux install on the Mini?

I run 'sudo apt-get install gparted', a FOSS program, and in less than a minute I've already got it moving the partition. No hassle. No BS.

And if this whole thing doesn't just sum up the operating system trio, I don't know what does.

Now unfortunately there's an unhappy part two to this story.

After GParted finished its 13 HOUR move operation, I switch the drive back over to my tower machine so it could expand its own partition.

Problem #3: WTF is this!?

The partitions were all screwed up! The NFTS volume was the wrong size, a fraction of what it was supposed to be! The HFS+ volume was the right size, but in the wrong place! There were two adjacent but distinct "unallocated" spaces, one of which appeared unformattable! GParted, what did you do!?

Switching back to Linux reveals the truth… Everything is fine, actually. The partitions are exactly how they should be, and all the files in them are intact and fully readable. Windows is just stupid.

I agonize over this for hours, doing countless web searches all turning up not a single helpful bit of info. Apparently nobody has ever had this happen before. Figures. It seems like a simple enough issue: Windows is wrong; the problem is it's obstinately wrong and cannot be corrected.

Uggggggghhhh. Fine. I wipe the entire drive and start backing everything up to it all over again.

The moral of the story is Windows wasted two continuous days of my life. Fuck Windows. XD

I'm going to fucking scream.

It did it again. Any use of GParted on the disk causes it to read completely wrong in Windows. WHY ARE THERE NO OTHER REPORTS OF THIS!?

I have to first find a way to even back everything up, and then actually do it FOR THE THIRD TIME.

Well I found out more precisely what's happening here and proved it's reproducible. I still have no idea why it's happening or how to fix it after it does happen aside from wiping the entire disk, but oh well.

What's going on here is any time GParted edits the disk, Windows from then on is convinced it's MBR when it's actually GPT. All options to convert it to GPT are unavailable, with even third-party software citing a nonspecific partition table error. The disk can't even be wiped via Disk Management once it's like this; you have to use the CLI utility 'diskpart'.

So I guess Windows is just a brat and doesn't want any other dirty operating system touching its toys. Note that the reason I'm not pinning any blame on GParted for this is that LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE reads the drive correctly. So uhh...

TL;DR PSA: Don't use GParted on drives you intend to use with Windows, because Windows is stupid.

I'm hoping someone can correct me and tell me I'm somehow doing something wrong. I don't want to be an alarmist, and even after knowing what was happening I couldn't find even a single search result online of anyone else encountering this, but if I can save even one person's less-replacable-than-mine data it will be worth getting more eyes on this.

So I've recently been finally getting around to something I've wanted to do for a few years: switching to Linux.

To safely test out this process before applying it to my main tower machine, I decided to first do the switch over on an old Mac Mini which had a lot to gain from this as it was stuck on an outdated and unsupported version of MacOS.

But of course this all involved shuffling around a lot of old data and making sure everything was backed up. And here's where the story begins.

I backed up the Mini's MacOS install to its own partition on an external backup drive shared by my Windows tower machine. Once done, I shrank it to only the used size( which was complicated in its own right for reasons I'll explain shortly,) and then wanted to move it to the end of the drive so I could expand the Windows partition back out to fill the unused space.

Problem #1: MacOS's Disk Utility is so stripped down and lacking in functionality in the name of gloss, it literally cannot work with unallocated space on a drive in any way. You cannot see unallocated space, and you cannot create it. Want to shrink or delete a partition? It automatically creates a new one to fill the space whether you wanted it or not. Want to make a new partition in unallocated space without wiping the whole drive? Gotta use a different OS to make a dummy partition first and then replace it in Disk Utility. And the real problem… Want to move a partition? Can't.

Problem #2: Windows's Disk Management doesn't know what HFS+ is and refuses to work with it. Windows can't even read the Mac backup partition, let alone move it. But wait! I can use EaseUS Partition Manager! …Aaand most of its essential functionality is locked behind one of its multiple paywall tiers, including the ability to work with non-Windows filesystems at all.

But what about that new Linux install on the Mini?

I run 'sudo apt-get install gparted', a FOSS program, and in less than a minute I've already got it moving the partition. No hassle. No BS.

And if this whole thing doesn't just sum up the operating system trio, I don't know what does.

Now unfortunately there's an unhappy part two to this story.

After GParted finished its 13 HOUR move operation, I switch the drive back over to my tower machine so it could expand its own partition.

Problem #3: WTF is this!?

The partitions were all screwed up! The NFTS volume was the wrong size, a fraction of what it was supposed to be! The HFS+ volume was the right size, but in the wrong place! There were two adjacent but distinct "unallocated" spaces, one of which appeared unformattable! GParted, what did you do!?

Switching back to Linux reveals the truth… Everything is fine, actually. The partitions are exactly how they should be, and all the files in them are intact and fully readable. Windows is just stupid.

I agonize over this for hours, doing countless web searches all turning up not a single helpful bit of info. Apparently nobody has ever had this happen before. Figures. It seems like a simple enough issue: Windows is wrong; the problem is it's obstinately wrong and cannot be corrected.

Uggggggghhhh. Fine. I wipe the entire drive and start backing everything up to it all over again.

The moral of the story is Windows wasted two continuous days of my life. Fuck Windows. XD

I'm going to fucking scream.

It did it again. Any use of GParted on the disk causes it to read completely wrong in Windows. WHY ARE THERE NO OTHER REPORTS OF THIS!?

I have to first find a way to even back everything up, and then actually do it FOR THE THIRD TIME.

So I've recently been finally getting around to something I've wanted to do for a few years: switching to Linux.

To safely test out this process before applying it to my main tower machine, I decided to first do the switch over on an old Mac Mini which had a lot to gain from this as it was stuck on an outdated and unsupported version of MacOS.

But of course this all involved shuffling around a lot of old data and making sure everything was backed up. And here's where the story begins.

I backed up the Mini's MacOS install to its own partition on an external backup drive shared by my Windows tower machine. Once done, I shrank it to only the used size( which was complicated in its own right for reasons I'll explain shortly,) and then wanted to move it to the end of the drive so I could expand the Windows partition back out to fill the unused space.

Problem #1: MacOS's Disk Utility is so stripped down and lacking in functionality in the name of gloss, it literally cannot work with unallocated space on a drive in any way. You cannot see unallocated space, and you cannot create it. Want to shrink or delete a partition? It automatically creates a new one to fill the space whether you wanted it or not. Want to make a new partition in unallocated space without wiping the whole drive? Gotta use a different OS to make a dummy partition first and then replace it in Disk Utility. And the real problem… Want to move a partition? Can't.

Problem #2: Windows's Disk Management doesn't know what HFS+ is and refuses to work with it. Windows can't even read the Mac backup partition, let alone move it. But wait! I can use EaseUS Partition Manager! …Aaand most of its essential functionality is locked behind one of its multiple paywall tiers, including the ability to work with non-Windows filesystems at all.

But what about that new Linux install on the Mini?

I run 'sudo apt-get install gparted', a FOSS program, and in less than a minute I've already got it moving the partition. No hassle. No BS.

And if this whole thing doesn't just sum up the operating system trio, I don't know what does.

Now unfortunately there's an unhappy part two to this story.

After GParted finished its 13 HOUR move operation, I switch the drive back over to my tower machine so it could expand its own partition.

Problem #3: WTF is this!?

The partitions were all screwed up! The NFTS volume was the wrong size, a fraction of what it was supposed to be! The HFS+ volume was the right size, but in the wrong place! There were two adjacent but distinct "unallocated" spaces, one of which appeared unformattable! GParted, what did you do!?

Switching back to Linux reveals the truth… Everything is fine, actually. The partitions are exactly how they should be, and all the files in them are intact and fully readable. Windows is just stupid.

I agonize over this for hours, doing countless web searches all turning up not a single helpful bit of info. Apparently nobody has ever had this happen before. Figures. It seems like a simple enough issue: Windows is wrong; the problem is it's obstinately wrong and cannot be corrected.

Uggggggghhhh. Fine. I wipe the entire drive and start backing everything up to it all over again.

The moral of the story is Windows wasted two continuous days of my life. Fuck Windows. XD

tomorrow i will ride an elephant sized isopod into a crowded public area and we will all find out what happens next together

You might assume my biggest gripe with "Star Trek: Insurrection" is the mediocre writing that led to the downfall of the 90's Trek empire (poor script led to bad audience reception which led to Paramount forcing outside writers/directors to take the reins on the next film which resulted in Nemesis)

but no

it's this shirt.

It's something about the thick, heavily starched, car upholstery fabric mixed with the inhumanly strange neckline and gaping sleeves that get to me.

It almost looks okay at some angles, like when it's pulled back by a gun strap or a heavy leather jacket, thus making the neckline look slightly more normal.

See? Not so bad here. Just some suspicious corners.

For whatever reason, Patrick Stewart decided to go from his regular level of buffness to wildly bulky buff at the prime athletic age of 58.

On the left is a still from "Safe House", which was released the same year as "Insurrection". On the right, a BTS shot from the actual movie. As you can see, he has deltoids the size of ripe cantaloupes and bulging barbarian biceps.

Now, you'd THINK you'd want to accentuate these features, right? You'd have a slim fit shirt of thin material with tailored, tight sleeves. You'd want the quinquagenarian to look his most action-y in the big expensive action movie, right? But does this shirt do that??

NO.

In fact, this hunk of old couch actually makes PStew's arms, neck, and shoulders look smaller and out of proportion due to the baggy sleeves and bizarre neckline.

With the high rear collar that curves down over the shoulders combined with the horizontal front, it looks downright chelonian. In a world where they could've made anything, they made my guy look like a turtle.

Gives a whole new definition to "turtle neck"

Look at that gaping maw of a sleeve and the dark abyss under the collar. They took this man's measurements, hand picked this fabric, and then hand sewed and tailored this. Everything here was a deliberate choice. What happened? Advanced macular degeneration? Drugs? Someone lied on their resume about being a tailor? Spite? All the above?

Even here, with biceps fully deployed, the collar at the back of his neck is a safety hazard. It could snag on the warp core or an ODN conduit. Prisons make better fitting clothes.

Are there worse costuming atrocities committed in the franchise? Of course. But this was a big budget movie with lots of time and money to plan and the costume in question was for the lead actor.

Even these modesty rags from "Chain of Command" fit better than that shirt.

Okay, now I'm done.

am I crazy or does the fact that google has become unusable feel premeditated

Well… I'm reluctant to invent a full-blown conspiracy theory, but has anyone considered that the nation that effectively controls the vast majority of the internet is being taken over by a would-be dictatorship backed by tech giants who have dedicated much of their resources lately into the development of a technology that can instantaneously alter information according to instruction?

My friend and I live in distant geographical areas and use different ISPs, and we've both noticed that lately multiple websites with unrelated content delivery networks have been extremely slow to load some of their images despite the connection being fine and the images being unremarkable in size and format.

Fascists have always wished they could rewrite history. What if they had an invisible machine to rewrite it for them between the source and the reader?

She's not an Oasis fan.

Here are the first two panels without text, in case anyone want to make this a meme template.

Lyra, my beloved cat of 13 years, passed away this year on Father's Day. She's been by my side through very difficult times and was my little rock of steady and unrelenting love. I struggled a lot drawing this, and struggled a lot posting it, but I know I would've wanted to read a comic like this that validated my grief for her when I lost her.

Wherever you are, Lyra my little summer star, I love you always! Thank you for being the best thing in my life.

using sinistar's scream as an NES soundfont is ruining my fucking life

It really did go

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

Thanks to whoever tried, but I knew they'd never allow it.

Let's do it the old fashioned way. Spread it far and wide.