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THE SOAP BOX 1998/01/14 |
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1998/01/14: Crash, Bang - Part 1
We love computers, don't we... Day 1, Christmas Eve 1997 I shut down quickly to prevent any further damage. I didn't want to keep Win95 running, because I felt that all of the disk activity would mess things up more. After rebooting into DOS, I checked all of the partitions. The FAT on drive G: was bad. It's one thing to have a bad sector where a data file is located, but it is entirely another thing to have a bad sector in the FAT. Shock. Dismay. Day 2, Christmas Day 1997 Day 3, December 26 1997 But now, where to start? I knew that I wanted something simpler and cleaner than I had. This is what my old drive layout looked like:
You can see that each partition was about 500MB (except for I:). This small partition size kept the cluster size down to 8KB. I had so many partitions because my system had grown over the years and it always made sense to keep things organized this way. Also, in the earlier years, DOS had limits on partition sizes. With the addition of a new hard drive, the new layout would simpler:
You can see that any one of the drives could fail, and I would be able to recover fairly quickly. For example, if WestDig 3.1 failed, then I could open the CPU case and move the cable to make drive E: into C:. I would also lose my backup of D:, but that would be fine until I had a chance to buy another drive. Another example: If I lost the D: drive, then I could replace it and unzip the stuff on F:. Finally, If I lost E:, then I would have only lost my backup of C:, which would be no problem. The new cluster size would be 32k, which bugged me, but I didn't have a choice. Also, for backing up files I couldn't use PKZIP on long filenames because the Win95 version (which supported long filenames) did not support command-line parameters! That meant that I could not schedule an automatic PKZIP session with the Windows version, so I was limited to compressing only the files on the short-name drive (D:). In any case, copying the entire drive C: directory structure uncompressed would allow for a very quick recovery time, and the file attributes would be copied too. Once I decided on a new arrangement of drives and partitions, I had to figure out how to get from the old to the new. The key issue was the long filenames -- I needed to be running Win95 to copy those. So, I needed to run a temporary instance of Win95 in order to copy the broken Win95 to its new location on drive C:. The first thing to do was to make space for both the temporary Win95 on my current drive I:, and the future Win95 on C:. How to make space? Maybe now was a good time to get that ZIP drive I had been thinking about... Day 4, December 27 1997 Never go shopping when you are in shock. Cost so far: ... That's a kilobuck that I did not have. I put the RAM in the machine to bring it up to 64MB, and then played Descent, supposedly to confirm that it worked... I guess I was just avoiding the task ahead. The hard drive was still sitting on my desk. I ended the day on an positive beat -- the ZIP drived installed easily and worked flawlessly the first time. Day 5, December 28 1997 Day 6, December 29 1997 Day 7, December 30 1997 At this point I had a temporary copy of Win95 on drive I: that still thought it was on drive G:, so I had to change the Registry to point to I: instead of G:. Unable and unwilling to run Win95, I used my own small utility program to "hack" the Registry, by performing a binary search and replace to alter drive G: and H: references to I:. I found an incredible number of things that needed changing, and I later found out that I forgot to change USER.DAT, which was not stored in the main Windows directory but in a user subdirectory. I took a break to resurrect Windows 3.1 and run Netscape 2 in order to check e-mail. 31 messages in. Sent 1 out. At this time, I estimated that another week would be needed to finish. That guess turned out to be a good one... Day 8, December 31 1997 So I had to use REGEDIT in DOS/Real mode to export the original Registry to a text file, which I then edited and imported into the temporary installation. This worked for about 60% of the values, because the DOS-based Registry editor could not handle the size of my Registry. Plus, there are several files that make up the Registry, and I missed some. Apparently, however, I did change enough to run Win95 on drive I:. So, at last, I was able to copy Win95 from G: to C:, long filenames included. But at this point I still had not installed my new hard drive. Continue, for the rest of the story... Previous: 1997/12/17 - The PDF Format Next: 1998/01/28 - Crash, Bang - Part 2 |
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