A friend of a friend of the family posed the question.
"Can you recover some photos for me from an old PC, then wipe the disk and scrap the PC"
Sure says I, easy peasy, cost you a decent bottle of wine.
Said PC turns up with a cheap nasty bottle of Spanish red plonk. Grrrrrr
Examine PC, no CD writer, no USB ports, windows ME. Find photos in drive and escrow them into a subdir in the root. Ok no problem, take out drive, connect it to the unused ide subsystem on the home pc, fire up windows 7, cant see drive.
Ah Ping! Its formatted in Fat16, Windows 7 cant see fat16!
Take out drive, put it in my Ubuntu system. Use graphical disk manager, - What? can see drive but not partition, Grrr Win 7 has screwed the MBR Grrr.
Take out all drives except the drive in question, boot machine with xp disk, recovery console, fix MBR,
put Ubuntu boot drive back in, boot ubuntu, can now see drive, mount the drive, Mount a USB drive, copy photos to USB stick as back up, then burn a CD.
Grrrr all for a bottle of cheap nasty spanish plonk.
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I always dread data recovery on anything less than XP. In this situation I would have been tempted use one of my ancient spare IDE drives, format it as FAT 32 and copy all the data onto that.
Of course you need a working spare IDE driver in the first place, which I suspect most people don't have.
You need to be careful about people using you like this, it happens to me occasionally but I politely tell people I am too busy. Most friends of the family pay me what ever I charge though, but I do knock a bit off.
Got one now, mates router blew up in a lightening storm, and the amount of faff e.g confirming the problem via getting him to check the status of the modem, then advising of what to buy, and then when he gets it no doubt he will want me to tell him over the phone how to get it working.
He lives ten miles away so I am not doing a 20 mile round trip for nothing. It is worse when friends don't pay you when its your job.
Last edited by: RattleandSmoke on Thu 9 Jun 11 at 12:32
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So how did the pics get on there then? Could you have put in an IDE DVD or CD writer?
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>>
>> So how did the pics get on there then? Could you have put in an
>> IDE DVD or CD writer?
The only way they could have got on there was from a cd that had them on.
It would have needed drivers, it was running a basic version of MSCDEX. This thing was running a serial mouse, and a PS2 Keyboard.
I didnt have a serial mouse so had to remember all my windows keyboard commands.
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 9 Jun 11 at 12:59
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>> I always dread data recovery on anything less than XP. In this situation I would
>> have been tempted use one of my ancient spare IDE drives, format it as FAT
>> 32 and copy all the data onto that.
>>
If I was making a habit of IT stuff I think I'd keep a couple of old machines handy, one running W2K and one Ubuntu or summat, so that I didn't have to faff around re-configuring stuff when old stuff needs working on.
>>
>> Got one now, mates router blew up in a lightening storm,
>>
That could be fun, the Dell 3000 3GHz P4 system Spamcan Junior uses had suffered a dead modem due to lightning strike, it can cause all sorts of subtle problems. To this day the system won't recognise any changes to the IDE busses unless I remove the battery backup and disconnect it from the mains for 10 mins.
Last edited by: spamcan61 on Thu 9 Jun 11 at 14:13
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>> If I was making a habit of IT stuff I think I'd keep a couple
>> of old machines handy, one running W2K and one Ubuntu or summat, so that I
>> didn't have to faff around re-configuring stuff when old stuff needs working on.
Indeed I have a ubuntu machine under the desk for that very reason. And you lot thought I hated Linux.
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>> Examine PC, no CD writer, no USB ports, windows ME. Find photos in drive and
>> escrow them into a subdir in the root.
Did the PC have internet access?
If so, upload photos to a hosting site. Give url of site to friend. Job done.
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>> >> Examine PC, no CD writer, no USB ports, windows ME. Find photos in drive
>> and
>> >> escrow them into a subdir in the root.
>>
>> Did the PC have internet access?
No. If it did I would simply have put it on the home network. It had old ISA slots so I didnt even have a NIC to put it in.
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I don't think I understood a word of this thread other than "plonk".
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Did it have an ethernet port?
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>> Did it have an ethernet port?
>
No.
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>>I don't think I understood a word of this thread other than "plonk"<<
That's because you're a plonker (like me!)
:-D
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I'm in the same category as Mapmaker and Dog.
I wonder why we bother to look into this part of the forum?
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Thankfully my mates PC was connected via WIFI and no ethernet cable so there won't be any motherboard damage. Replaced a few boards in the past as a result of lightening damage but most the times a new NIC solves the problem.
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When someone mentions "motherboard" I think of these.
www.flickr.com/photos/37090329@N07/5161436832/
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>> When someone mentions "motherboard" I think of these.
I was thinking of googling boardmothers for a link, but thought better of it.
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>>When someone mentions "motherboard" I think of these.
www.flickr.com/photos/37090329@N07/5161436832/<<
Jesus! - that looks just like my mum in the 1950's,
she dyed her hair that colour, had that complexion, wore the turban, had the rubbing board and that sink + a 'copper' to boil the weekly washing - no washing machine/spin dryer/tumble dryer, fridge or freezer etc., etc., etc.
We don't know we're alive today!
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>> I'm in the same category as Mapmaker and Dog.
>>
>> I wonder why we bother to look into this part of the forum?
>>
Same here.
I like to know who the geeks are and try and imagine what colour anoraks and tank tops they wear. I always get an image of Zero in a pair of flares and Cuban heel boots.
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I have the cuban heel boots.
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Geeks are geniuses who have no social life because they are always coming up with brilliant new stuff.
Nerds are just that, slightly scary people who look like they belong in an institution.
I am neither.
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Careful there Rats, dont give them the ammo...
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They can think what they like, we know the truth :).
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As Windows ME was the first Microsoft operating system to automatically recognise and set up USB PCI expansion cards I think I'd have popped a spare one in and copied photos straight to a flash drive.
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It didn't have PCI slots. It Had ISA slot.
Last edited by: Zero on Thu 16 Jun 11 at 08:06
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Sounds like its so old, it should never had ME on it. I think the oldest pre PCI board I have seen is the last of the VESA Local bus ones with the those crude 32-bit ISA slots.
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>> Sounds like its so old, it should never had ME on it. I think the
>> oldest pre PCI board I have seen is the last of the VESA Local bus
>> ones with the those crude 32-bit ISA slots.
You haven't lived until you've played with an IBM PS/2 with Micro Channel Architecture!
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>> You haven't lived until you've played with an IBM PS/2 with Micro Channel Architecture!
Very well built machines in their time. You could open them and swap components without tools.
Zero took the best option when dealing which such an old machine - take the drive and connect to something else that has either networking or USB storage. Trouble was the machine was so old it had 16bit FAT filesystem.
Lesson learned - old machines mean you ought to connect to something slightly newer (e.g. XP) or Linux.
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Me and my mate bought a PS/2 once, I think it was the model 55, it had a 386 and 1MB of RAM. We upgraded the RAM, put Windows 3.1 and DOS 6.22 and sold it for twice the price :).
We were very puzzled at the MCA slots, never seen them before at the time, but then we must have only been about 15.
The oldest PC we ever bought was a late 80's Tanden 386. It must have cost £1000s when new. It had an MFM 20mb hard drive, the motherboard was about four times the size of a current one, and everything needed its own controller. I seem to remember even the floppy drive had its own controller card. It had a green screen monitor with a Hercules video card.
We put an IBM PS/2 VGA monitor with it we used to pay £15 each for, and put in a VGA card, tried to sell it for twice the price but there was no takers. It was too old even in 1997. I think we were asking £60 for it, which wasn't a lot in 1997 for a 386 with 4MB of RAM.
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In about 1990/1 our entire office went from dumb terminals to IBM PS/2 55SX's overnight running Windows 3.1. I think then they were about £3,500 a throw, so it must have cost a fortune. Two or three years later they were all replaced with 486's running Windows NT 3.51. The staff got to buy the old 55SX's for about £75 so that's how I know about MCA. An extra 1MB RAM cost about £120 in 1995 as it coincided with the Kobe earthquake taking out many semiconductor production facilities.
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I know about MCA slots because I was one of the UK technical specialists on the product.
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I remember that, we paid over £1k for an IBM PS/1 in early 1993 which had just 2MB of RAM. I was so desperate to upgrade but I think just 1MB for that cost about £100 as it was not standard 30-pin stuff.
I ended up buying a second hand 486 DX4 to replace it in 1997. By late 97 I was building my own PCs mainly based on the Cyrix processors as they were so cheap.
Once my parents realised what me and my mate were up to they put a stop to it. Was quite amusing when people came to buy PCs off us, they did not expect it to be a couple of 15 years olds! I think we sold about 8 in total and made about £50 each on them.
No money in PCs at all now.
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>> No money in PCs at all now.
As Mesh Computers seem to have just found out!
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Yup, the last of the assemblers in the UK. They tried to diversify the market, but never did it fast enough
I know the bloke who started it, he was the first to import IBM clone PC cases, popped round his place in north london to buy one from one his first container loads
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My main supplier has gone bust this week too, which has caused me a bit of a logistics head ache.
I am surprised Mesh lasted as long as it did, if you want a decent quality PC you probably know how to build one yourself.
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I have a MESH desktop - must be nearly 5 years old (Remember that a particular unexpected job paid for it) - it has worked generally quite well and still does although these days gets little use and hasn't been powered up since we moved house. Zero gave my selection the go-ahead in the other place and his prediction about it was right, including a noisy power supply.
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About five years ago or so I used to have to fix a year MESH computers which where barely a year old. Poor power supplies was one issue, I remember being quite shocked that the PSU was in such an expensive machine. The other issue I had was the computer kept shutting it off, when I investigated I discovered the heat sink was loose.
I am really hoping people start buying desktops again though.
The other thing affecting the PC industry is that PCs don't need upgrading much these days. My PC is an Athlon X2 4200 with 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia 8600GT, the sound card is now the most valuable thing in it. I do have a 1TB hard drive though.
Almost bought a new motherboard and CPU before, but I just cannot bring myself to spend £150 on a computer because my ancient PC is fast enough. When my sister moves out though, this PC will become my workshop test machine, so I will build a new one then.
I am sure people are getting sick of laptops though, so many I see need new graphics chips before they are two years old.
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Beware helping out friends and family. - RattleandSmoke
