hard disk fixed with frozen peas

[nibot]

Holy crap! The freezer trick worked^†! I left the dead hard disk in the freezer overnight. ... Tonight I rushed it out in a chilled pyrex dish in the company of various frozen vegetables. With power supplied, the disk just clicked twice like before. I gave it a whack and it came to life, begrudgingly, and with lots of bad scraping and grinding noises. It lived for just seven minutes, but that was enough time to copy it! (The whole disk image is only 1.4 GB!)

Thanks to Linux for making this easy:

dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=./bbs	Copy entire disk partition to a file
mount -o loop ./bbs /media/loop	Mount that file as a filesystem

Above is a rendition (via ansi2png) of the one file I wanted from that disk: the welcome screen to the BBS I ran in junior high and high school, and, after a three-year intermission, for a brief time in college. It was called the Digital Forest (or even "Digital Forest Information System"!). The ANSI graphic was created by Lord Jazz (I never knew him by any other name) who shortly thereafter became a member of ACiD (which is apparently still around).

Maybe for hilarity purposes I'll try to boot this disk image. It's OS/2!

^†It's possible the freezer had nothing to do with it; when I powered the disk up earlier and got only the clicks, I didn't try hitting it or anything else.

Comments

[gaal.livejournal.com]

Haha, I used to run a BBS on OS/2, too.

Next time you need to recover data from a dying disk (shudder), use conv=noerror,sync, or ddrescue (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/), so that if you get errors on the way they don't screw up the whole image.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip!

What was your bbs called?

[gaal.livejournal.com]

"Myth". I forget the Fido node number! I just remember netmails to/from the States took a week, if they arrived at all.

[jtunison.livejournal.com]

That's awesome.

[svino.livejournal.com]

As luck would have it, I'm in the process of trying to recover data from a hard drive right now. I'm hoping we won't have to resort to the freezer trick, but it's good to see that it worked for you.

[shamster.livejournal.com]

HAHA! Holy crap indeed!

good news on all fronts!

[chris-acheson.livejournal.com]

I always wanted to run a BBS when I was younger. Never had the resources to spare for an extra phone line, computer, and modem, though.

I did manage to run up my share of $300 phone bills dialing out, though.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

My BBS started out with the hours of "10pm-7am" so I could use the phone line.. surprisingly my parents went along with it! But I think it was my and my brother's monopolization of the phone line (dialing out in the afternoon) did a lot to persuade my parents to go for the 2nd phone line.

[nanomonkey.livejournal.com]

I used to be co-sysop for a WWIV board called Dead Cat Alley. Man, that was some fun stuff. I've been meaning to port over a web based version of our bbs for quite some time.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that maybe everyone on my friends list was a sysop or at least a caller back in the 90's, but if so, they're certainly shy to admit it! I am terribly nostalgic for the BBS era, though I guess the internet really is infinitely better.

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Always a cosysop, never a sysop. Except on one board. When instant validation was a selling point, Hukt On Fonix featured instant validation to sysop level. Much cleverness and hackery went on, and it lasted a surprisingly long time before a random sysop finally wiped the message boards.

Strangely enough, 10 years later I ended up moving into the house that that board was run out of. The room I stayed in when I first moved in still has the nail holes where the motherboard was nailed to the wall (a shortage of cases, you see), and the scorch where the floppy drive came loose, hit the motherboard, and brought that era to an end.