Comments on: [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Rockin' Kat

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:18:19 +0000

I’ve had two hard drive failiures with my current computer. The first one didn’t nix any of my data. When I took the computer in for waranty repair(I’d only had it for about 3 months) the Apple certified repair shop copied the contents of my damaged drive to the new replacement hard drive. That was back in 2001…

Now, about a year or two ago I had the main boot drive…which I think was the one that they put in place of the one that failed the first time, just go completely tits up… the computer tried to access the drive and Mac OS X crashed hard. So I hit the restart button on the computer…. and found myself staring at a folder with a flashing question mark on it…. followed by it finding my OS 9 boot partition on another drive…which is when it hit me that something had just gone horribly wrong. I knew at that instant that my hard drive had just crashed.

So I tried the only thing I could think of… once OS 9 booted, I shut the comptuer down. Popped it open, and pounded my fist on the crashed drive. I turned it back on and the drive showed up on the desktop… and then dragged the bad drive’s icon over another hard drive and let it copy the whole thing under OS 9. I only lost some old iMovie stuff which would not copy.

I’m lazy… I havn’t run a back up of a hard drive since 1995… When I backed up the 350MB hard drive in my PowerMac 6100/60 to floppies.

A few years ago I found a box full of old floppies from the early to mid 1990s when I was in elementary school. I put them in one of my older Macs and was sorely dissapointed to find that over half of them had major I/O errors… Back then I used floppies as permanent(hah!) storage a lot because the 350MB hard disk in my 6100 was somewhat cramped. I lost a lot of good pirated games(nothing quite like the elementary school student piracy rings eh?) and some artwork I had done in claris works and Hypercard to that. Now, that really sucked.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Eric Lambert

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:05:13 +0000

My parents’ first computer (a 286 clone) had a somewhat-graphical menu system. My brother borrowed the 5.25 floppy to use on a friend’s computer, and then forgot about it and left it in his car. In full sunlight. For days. Of course, we only found out about this after needing to wipe and reload my parents’ PC. Enter one badly warped floppy disk that would not fit into the drive.

The story has a happy ending, though. I was able to take a blank floppy, pop the sealed edges open, remove the magnetic media, and transfer the (relatively) undamaged media from the original disk into it. It worked long enough for us to transfer the data off of it and put it in a safe location.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Kitsunexus

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:56:55 +0000

What a coincidence! GHB lets you have no bad memories either! ^_^

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: GeorgeR

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:01:55 +0000

I’ve only had one memory loss issue, I hadn’t backed up in about a month or two and the drive just died. I took it to my friend who is a Linux admin and we managed to get the most important stuff off it before it finally gave up the ghost.

But man, do I wish I had those floppies. I mean, dang.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Zoyous

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:46:17 +0000

I’ve had a couple of hard drives die on me… it’s been their motors that have gradually given out. Fortunately it happened slowly enough that I had time to copy everything off them. But it was weird how the symptoms showed themselves sometimes. One particular time I was playing some music off the hard drive and its playback actually slowed down smoothly, as though a turntable were gradually coming to a stop, then sped back up to normal speed.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Jason Scott

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 06:28:30 +0000

DE SCREEN!
DE SCREEN!

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: SQLGuru

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 02:36:54 +0000

I’ve got some 5 1/4 disks with some personal data that the last time I tried to read them were severely degraded. I got off what I could (still have the originals, too), but some of it has gone to the great /dev/null in the sky. While it wasn’t anything critical, it is fond memories from a time that I consider the best time of my life. Luckily, most of it is also printed out (on 128 column green and white form feed paper).

Layne

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Benj Edwards

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:27:58 +0000

Then I guess she should have been selling hard disks.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Gentlegamer

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:17:15 +0000

Looking at that ad, what was once floppy . . . is no longer floppy.

ifyougetwhatimean

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Floppy Girl Doesn’t Remember by: Jim Ulrich

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:12:40 +0000

It looks like there is nothing but (bad) memories left for Opus. It looks like they went out of business in 1991:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-10730758.html