Antiquing again
Got a call from an fairly large outfit that does window washing for hi-rise buildings in Los Angeles (I see their trucks here and there around town).
They use DacEasy 4.x for Dos, with custom mods for jobs and repetitive billing, written by someone who died soon after. It runs on an IBM PS1 (c1990).
Something was wrong, so I went down and had a look at the screen. It looked like a hard disk problem to me, so I yanked the machine, brought it to the office, yanked the drive (the original 170 Meg (yes Meg) drive the machine came with) and attached it to my WinXP support computer.
On boot, it showed a hard disk, but not properly mounted. I rebooted, and it came up mounted and showing files. I immediately copied the whole disk to a directory on my hard disk. As luck would have it, all files copied, and then the hard disk went bonkers.
I tried running SpinRite on it. SpinRite red-screened and said it wouldn't touch that drive nohow.
Well, I had all the files, and that would sure save me a lot of time piecing the system back together.
So I went to storage and found a nice 850-Meg drive that worked fine. I didn't have install disks for the ancient IBM PC-DOS on the original drive, but MS-DOS 6.22 worked fine, even with IBM's Dosshell menu system, which was still in use. I've always hated Dosshell, but it was a complex set-up, so I'm glad I didn't have to redo it.
All back togther - except - I had taken out the modem because it was in the way. If I put it back in, the floppy didn't work, and she backs up to floppy. Oh well, I'm sure the modem isn't used any more, if it ever was.
Of course, I wrote the contents of that old drive to two CDs for future reference. One I'll give to them, and keep the other "just in case".
They use DacEasy 4.x for Dos, with custom mods for jobs and repetitive billing, written by someone who died soon after. It runs on an IBM PS1 (c1990).
Something was wrong, so I went down and had a look at the screen. It looked like a hard disk problem to me, so I yanked the machine, brought it to the office, yanked the drive (the original 170 Meg (yes Meg) drive the machine came with) and attached it to my WinXP support computer.
On boot, it showed a hard disk, but not properly mounted. I rebooted, and it came up mounted and showing files. I immediately copied the whole disk to a directory on my hard disk. As luck would have it, all files copied, and then the hard disk went bonkers.
I tried running SpinRite on it. SpinRite red-screened and said it wouldn't touch that drive nohow.
Well, I had all the files, and that would sure save me a lot of time piecing the system back together.
So I went to storage and found a nice 850-Meg drive that worked fine. I didn't have install disks for the ancient IBM PC-DOS on the original drive, but MS-DOS 6.22 worked fine, even with IBM's Dosshell menu system, which was still in use. I've always hated Dosshell, but it was a complex set-up, so I'm glad I didn't have to redo it.
All back togther - except - I had taken out the modem because it was in the way. If I put it back in, the floppy didn't work, and she backs up to floppy. Oh well, I'm sure the modem isn't used any more, if it ever was.
Of course, I wrote the contents of that old drive to two CDs for future reference. One I'll give to them, and keep the other "just in case".