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

[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.