So I was digging around online and folks kept mentioning this “john crump” thing. Honestly? Sounded kinda sketchy at first. But hey, always up for tinkering. Figured I’d just dive in and see what sticks.
Getting Ready
First things first, needed a decent machine. Grabbed my trusty old ThinkPad running Linux – feels right for this kind of messy experiment. Wiped an old USB drive clean, like really formatted it a couple times. Felt weird booting it live, kinda like whispering secrets to the hardware. Opened up that terminal window… it always looks back at you like “you sure about this?”.
The Actual Doing Part
Found this command floating around in forums: dd if=/john_crump_source of=/dev/sdb status=progress. Typed it out slow, finger hovering over enter for a second. Press. Drive lights started blinking crazy fast like a nervous squirrel. Whole thing felt… immediate? No turning back once that started. Just sat there watching percentages crawl, hoping the laptop battery wouldn’t quit on me.
Then the reboot. Keyboard felt sticky holding down F12. Boot menu popped up – shaky fingers selected the USB drive. Black screen for a second… longer than feels comfortable. Then bam! Raw text scrolls up crazy fast, like someone dumped a bucket of code letters onto the screen. Weird symbols, timestamps flickering, all kinda… hypnotic? Just let it run until it stopped shouting.
Throwing Stuff At It
Okay, time to poke the bear. Needed to see if it actually did something other than look scary.
- Tried a simple “ls -la” First thing popped up was “”. Okay then. That’s a mood.
- Typed “cat *” Got pure gibberish. Hex digits? Ancient symbols? Looked like my keyboard threw up.
- Created a dummy text file named “*” Wrote “hello john” just to feel involved. Hit save. Gone. Poof. Like it never existed. Filesystem playing hide-and-seek.
- Copied over a small image file Looked fine on the drive. Copied it back to my main system? Corrupted. Totally scrambled. Picture looked like bad TV static. Point made, I guess.
Felt like wrestling a ghost. Could hear the fans working harder too. Whole machine felt hotter, buzzing louder. Like it was working overtime processing… whatever this thing was doing in the background. Creepy.
Wrapping This Weird Trip Up
Pulled the USB drive eventually. Held it like it was slightly warm. Brain felt foggy too, honestly. Whole “john crump” experience? It’s less a tool, more like chucking a digital brick through a window. Breaks stuff spectacularly. Learned zero actual useful tech stuff. But the sheer chaos? Makes you appreciate basic stuff like “ls” actually listing files. Sometimes the weirdest journeys just remind you why the boring path exists. Shrugged, grabbed a coffee, felt weirdly satisfied. No clue what “john crump” even is, but I sure did it. Sort of.
