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It's a sad day...

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ChrisGWarp:
It's a sad day, as I can now say good bye to my trusty steed, of waaay too many years.

My development box was a Dual Pentium II (!) @ 400MHz with 512Mb RAM, 3 IBM 9Gb SCSI disks, a SCSI CD and a SCSI CD Writer and a Sony DDS 4 Tape drive. Built in the very early 90's. I can not think of the number of hours I've spent on that box. The tower of power has served me well, but it's time to finally put it out to pasture.

See attached image IMG_6063.JPG

I had to replace the boot drive, which failed - AS IT WAS BEING BACKED UP!!!! - with a new (well, new-ish) one. I found a tape backup from 11th of Nov 2006 !!!! And Fastback/2 could still restore it - the tape was good!

That got me back to 2006, which is good enough.

However, it's not all sad news, the next step was to ressurect the host as a VM.

That was a matter of virtualizing it to VMware Workstation. I used the cold clone ISO to clone it. That worked, sort of, but then it was a matter of getting the right drivers in place.
I need to add BTSCSI.ADD as a basedev. The LAN card auto detected as an IBM PCI Lan Adapter (IBMEAN$). The SciTech SNAP Drivers worked to max resolution. Took a day or two to get right. The final thing to do was to resync the Lan Manager accounts database. In short. It's all up and running.

See attached image IMG_6067.JPG

I even managed to run a test compile of my utils... And fix a bug where TaskMgr would crash if the screen size was too big. :)

Happy days.

Now I can tidy up that end of the house...  ;)

-Chris

Neil Waldhauer:
I hate it when a backup fails to restore. I'm glad you are still in business. A lot of authors lost their only copy of source code, and we miss their products.

Once ArcaOS 5.1 comes out, it will be reasonable to go back to a dual boot configuration, thanks to GPT support and also thanks to tweaks to various drivers to continue to operate on modern computers.

Ibrahim Hakeem:
I'm glad that you made it back, Chris! A 16-year lapse still isn't a total loss.
I love a good recovery story with a silver-lining like that - especially after learning the hard way how quickly an OS/2 installation can go bad when I started using it as a daily driver in 2018.

May I ask what keyboard you've got in IMG_6067? I have the sudden itch to add one to my legacy workbench.

Ian Manners:

--- Quote ---May I ask what keyboard you've got in IMG_6067? I have the sudden itch to add one to my legacy workbench.
--- End quote ---

Looks like its same one I'm typing this on, an IBM Model M :)

Ibrahim Hakeem:

--- Quote from: Ian Manners on July 19, 2022, 05:13:49 pm ---
--- Quote ---May I ask what keyboard you've got in IMG_6067? I have the sudden itch to add one to my legacy workbench.
--- End quote ---

Looks like its same one I'm typing this on, an IBM Model M :)

--- End quote ---

Much appreciated Ian, but I'm pretty familiar with the venerable Model M. I was referring to the one in the second image, you can see the top-row of it but not much else to be able to work out what model it specifically is  ;D

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