It was a normal Saturday night. Birds were singing, and flowers were blooming. Except that it was the middle of winter, birds had migrated south, and there were no flowers in sight in the 20-degree weather. There I sat, at 3 in the morning clutching my can of Monster Energy Mango Loco, peering at the chrome100 website in the dim glow of my screen. My school was retiring the old lars line of Chromebooks, and I was forced to migrate to the (marginally) newer and faster kindred Chromebooks. Of course, the first thing I would do with this Chromebook was to unenroll and fakemurk it. But alas, I could not find any trace of the kindred board on the chrome100 website. Although kindred is a subset of hatch, which is available on chrome100, when I tried to download those images, it refused to recover on my Chromebook.

I set out to find a solution. First, I tried copying the platform version numbers from the lars recovery images that I had used in the past into the kindred download links, but that yielded little success. Annoyed and extremely jittery from my high caffeine intake, I turned to ol’ reliable: Gobuster. I created a simple regex filter and began bruteforcing the edge download server. After a couple of seconds, it succeeded. Interestingly enough, there was a sitemap that listed all of the available downloads and their respective boards. I quickly downloaded the file and created torrents for the critical versions (v81 and v105), which I am now hosting on Chrome81, named after the version of ChromeOS that started this entire endeavour. If you, too, have recovery images for boards obscure enough to not be on Chrome100, please, create a torrent and contribute.

For now, though, check out the lazily thrown together website: https://rainestorme.github.io/chrome81/index.html