Originally
posted by
Ruthie:
wow Tirol ... that would be harder to recover than the zip drive, lol
Found a very old harddrive with an install of windows for workgroups 3.11 on it. Put that into an old Dell Optiplex GXa last night, and it booted right up...sort of. It kept telling me something about sound drivers (which is odd, since the system didn't even have a soundcard), and the mouse driver didn't load. Keyed navigation FTL.
I could tell the harddrive wasn't mine, mainly because of all the love letters, poems, and essays I found on it. I couldn't actually boot into windows itself, but the system deposited me on some sort of primitive graphical DOS desktop, where almost everything was password protected (except for Wordperfect 6.0). Everytime I would try to choose Windows from the menu, it would always pop up a blue screen, saying something about a sound driver, and then I'd end up back at the desktop.
I opened Wordperfect (I believe I had to press 'A' to open it), opened a few documents (Alt+F+O, F5 for File Manager, Enter), tried to copy all documents to a 5-1/2 floppy disk I found on the floor in the corner of my room under a bunch of stuff, had to scavenge another floppy drive from another computer and connect that to the system, had to find another floppy disk that would format (using a slightly newer system running XP), then had to exit the DOS GUI into the DOS CLI to copy all the documents to the disk. Then, swapped the floppy disk to the XP system, copied all the files to that system, then used a NetBIOS share to copy those files to my Win7 laptop, where I could then open the files using...Microsoft Office 2010. No file extension on most of the documents, so it was "choose program to open" everytime. All the documents came right up.
I was also able to play a few rounds of Doom 2 (Hell on Earth). Unfortunately, this was made slightly harder because the mouse driver wouldn't load (CTRL to shoot or use the chainsaw?). I should perhaps try putting the harddrive in an old gateway I have lying around somewhere (which, IIRC, has a soundcard), and seeing what happens.