Jedi alternate original recovery: acquisition blocked

No original package was recovered. Observed-tree restoration was not started: the 174 original-dependent mappings still lack their exact input bytes. There were no guest probes, installer replays, builds, production changes or workers.

Acquisition ran approximately 16:14–16:17 UTC on 2026-10-21, below the 20-minute limit. Four distinct source candidates were considered, conservatively counting the supplied archive lead as one:

  1. The preserved official download page links to http://www.3dgamers.com/3daction/00archives/jediknight/, not a local installer. Its parent JKDF2 archive directory returned HTTP 403.
  2. That 3D Gamers web link redirects to https://www.fileplanet.com/, HTTP 403. The actual historical FTP package link published in the Gamers.org FAQ, ftp://ftp.3dgamers.com/pub/3daction/jediknight/releases/jedidemo.exe, timed out connecting after 8.003 seconds, curl exit 28, zero bytes.
  3. The PCGamingWiki demo listing returned HTTP 403 and a JavaScript challenge. No bypass attempted.
  4. The RGB Classic Games forum preserves a historical Terra package URL inside a Wayback link. The original URL http://www.terra.com.br/games/downloads/jedi_knight_dark_forces_2/jedidemo.exe redirects to HTTPS and returns HTTP 404, curl exit 22, zero bytes. Wayback itself was not requested.

All shell acquisition requests used an eight-second connection timeout and 20-second page or 40-second package limit, with no retries. Package requests also capped advertised size at 21,195,858 bytes. None of the forbidden Archive.org endpoints or the predecessor's 3dfxzone challenge was retried. No alternate full game, patched executable or different demo bytes were accepted.

Identity and recovery handoff

Required package: jedidemo.exe, 21,195,858 bytes, SHA-256 8aae38165e08b68bb63cfd21b8c28ed1d4d8f1bb400a0162588d5b86acdc827e. Durable original location: none, locally or newly recovered remotely. This is a bounded acquisition failure, not proof that no other mirror exists.

The predecessor's offline verifier was rerun: PASS 16 seals, 7403 source inventory entries, 187 available / 174 original-dependent mappings, zero launch probes. That verifies retained evidence, not a new runtime replay. API exec confirmed /home/user/jedi-source remains clean at fe49a84e745015ecdbe752e028235924ef4324dc. No module search or build occurred.

On SAME box bx_wbedea9e, /home/user/jedi-predicate retains predecessor.tgz, recover-layout.py, restore.py, original-inventory.json and HANDOFF.md. Their hashes were checked through API exec and match the predecessor. Recipes were read before any use. After future exact package acquisition, recover all 39 source files with recover-layout.py, verify with --check, then provide restore.py a flat original directory using inventory-spelled basenames (not the lowercase nested faithful-source paths). restore.py checks every mapping; preserve all 28 installed-original hashes and use only the retained observed registry exports. Neither recipe was executed in this task because its required original input is missing.

The box is left RUNNING, API state=idle, health=ok, stop=null, expiry 2026-10-21T18:01:57.547Z. The coordinator owns shutdown and receives ownership back. Existing source, module and predecessor staging remain intact.

Evidence and storage

Evidence: docs/reviews/jedi-original-alternate-recovery-20261021/; run directory: /home/user/wine-assembly/scratch/runs/20261021-jedi-original-alternate-recovery. Run python3 verify.py in the evidence directory for the sealed blocker checks. No game binaries or credentials are committed. Original HTML is retained only in the task run directory; tracked evidence contains focused provenance excerpts and sanitized receipts, excluding challenge tokens and unrelated forum links.

The mandatory prewrite guard briefly blocked the Terra request: free space was 2,815,086,592 bytes at 16:16:13Z, below the 2,915,041,280-byte reserve. No package write proceeded then. A handoff check observed an actual recovery to 3.54 GB; the guarded Terra request then completed with 404. No unrelated cleanup occurred. The task stays under its 64 MiB allocation. Sparse checkout contains only the two instruction files plus this task's new evidence; shared config and root WIP are preserved. No main merge, deploy, SSH, new/resumed box or lifecycle action.

The initial messageboard ownership entry used an estimated 16:17Z timestamp; the claim actually preceded the observed 16:16:07Z clock receipt. Subsequent publication uses the system clock; this correction does not alter acquisition results.