Revive your old PC with Linux in 2026. I tested lightweight distros, zram tuning, SSD upgrades, and browser optimization on a 2014 ThinkPad to show you exactly what works.
What’s ext4rat? Web searches don’t turn anything up and I must have missed out on whatever it is, or was. (Which wouldn’t be the first time.)
I did find a Python script called ext4ract which apparently pulls files out of an ext4 filesystem, but it doesn’t seem to be a hugely well-known tool and I’m not sure how it’s relevant here.
It’s a tool that allowed to put all the files read during boot time in a sequential order in the hdd, minimizing the read time, so the device booted much faster.
DuckDuckGo is my default engine. It assumed I meant “extract” and gave me a dictionary definition along with links to download WinZip and WinRAR. When I told it I actually meant what I typed, it put it in quotes and returned no results.
It was not obvious that I should have omitted the X and the T.
What I apparently didn’t do was try Google afterwards, and I’m a little disturbed that I didn’t. Adding !g to the search in DDG is usually the first thing I do when it can’t find anything, but my browser history suggests I didn’t do that.
Only now after reading your comment that I realized it’s e4rat, and not ext4rat lol. I could swear I saw it written as ext4rat somewhere some years ago!
But anyway, I used ddg too, and it gave me that link among the first results, which is weird. I thought their search was reproducible, but turns out it’s not, just like google…
Is ext4rat still a thing? That would be a nice tip for anyone running the system on hdds
What’s ext4rat? Web searches don’t turn anything up and I must have missed out on whatever it is, or was. (Which wouldn’t be the first time.)
I did find a Python script called ext4ract which apparently pulls files out of an ext4 filesystem, but it doesn’t seem to be a hugely well-known tool and I’m not sure how it’s relevant here.
It’s a tool that allowed to put all the files read during boot time in a sequential order in the hdd, minimizing the read time, so the device booted much faster.
It’s this one: https://e4rat.sourceforge.net/
Note: I searched using duckduckgo and found it normally
DuckDuckGo is my default engine. It assumed I meant “extract” and gave me a dictionary definition along with links to download WinZip and WinRAR. When I told it I actually meant what I typed, it put it in quotes and returned no results.
It was not obvious that I should have omitted the X and the T.
What I apparently didn’t do was try Google afterwards, and I’m a little disturbed that I didn’t. Adding !g to the search in DDG is usually the first thing I do when it can’t find anything, but my browser history suggests I didn’t do that.
Only now after reading your comment that I realized it’s e4rat, and not ext4rat lol. I could swear I saw it written as ext4rat somewhere some years ago!
But anyway, I used ddg too, and it gave me that link among the first results, which is weird. I thought their search was reproducible, but turns out it’s not, just like google…
it’s as old and out-of-date as the systems you’d be wanting to use it on.