Nobody Cares about Tech Support

[Casey Pelous]

You can get an external cd drive for around $20.

Amazon.com

The great news is they're quite compact so they will fit easily in that spot where you "can't possibly lose it." Then you can buy another one in three years when you need one again.

Hmmmm? How do I know this? Let's not dwell on that right now.

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Depends on the connector. I had a ZIP drive with a SCSI interface.

She hooked it up to her Windows machine, so probably not SCSI.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

So, Beebo, if you felt like making a project out of all of this - with recovering your old Macintosh files, I mean - or you know someone you think might be up to it, what you COULD do...

Is use a program like this to make a virtual machine running Mac OS 9.x (or whichever version you had, they're all there). And hey look at that, it's WordPerfect, any version you like. ^^

Heck, I bet you could even take CC's suggestion to use HFSExplorer on Windows and then use one of the Windows versions of WordPerfect or Corel Office to open your old novel.

And all that would be free, costing you nothing but some time. The only thing you'd have to pay for is a floppy drive, and I know there's external USB floppy drives available in the usual places for pretty cheap, considering.

 

[Noodles]

She hooked it up to her Windows machine, so probably not SCSI.

Well, connectors work better if they get the scuzz out first.

 

[Beebo Brink]

So, Beebo, if you felt like making a project out of all of this - with recovering your old Macintosh files, I mean - or you know someone you think might be up to it, what you COULD do...

Thank you -- I'll add this to the list of computer projects I'm accumulating. To be honest, with a brand-new system, I'll be looking for excuses to just play with it.

Or use transfer floppy and zip disks at $6.95 a disk.

And this is a good fall-back option if I'm too lazy to try it myself. Thanks, CC!

 

[Noodles]

I did a similar project to get back some old First Choice text files, and a few old things Inhad build in a program called NewsMaster.

Those pretty much were just getting a copy of the program to run in DOSBOX though.

 

[Beebo Brink]

An iMac? OS9 or OSX iMac? Probably HFS formatted. You'll need something like HFSExplorer on Windows to read them

THAT WORKED!!

Thank you so much, CC. I've successfully transferred over about a few hundred photo images from the zip drive to my hard drive. I had to manually add .jpg file extensions to about half of them, which was tedious but kept my hands busy while listening to the news. And to my delight, this batch included those elusive pet photos from 2001 and 2002 that somehow didn't make it to this build.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Holllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyy sheep! That was a frickin' travail.

I have finally managed to get my system drive switched to GPT and successfully installed Win11. It was two-and-a-half days of screwing around with BIOS/UEFI, various disk management programs, attempts at running various command line programs, a sidetrack into a bootable-USB-OS making program called Rufus, multiple brickings of the unit in question, and more.

My virulent antipathy toward MS grows and grows. When one copypastas THEIR command line prompt into one's command line and it barfs up "invalid command," one tends to think ill of the originator.

What eventually fixed it was likely to be utterly inexplicable by anyone not the person(s) who wrote the MS install program: I started a reinstall of Win10, then aborted it and, voila, the computer started working just fine. WTF?

Unfortunately, it is still booting off the old system drive. There's a sparkly new M.2 slot SSD in there now that should be zippity fast, but I cannot convince the computer to boot from that one, despite it holding an allegedly perfect copy of the contents of the current system drive. A project for another day.

Thanks, everybody, for your help -- it is really nice to know I have some knowledgeable friends to help me out of these messes I create!

ETA: Yes, I know I long ago passed the point where it would have been much faster and easier to just nuke everything and start from scratch. It became a contest of wills, okay. I know you've been there, too. (Perhaps I should change my username to Sunkcost Fallacy ....)

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

THAT WORKED!!

Thank you so much, CC.

Yay! Glad it worked.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Got it to boot off the new SSD.

I'm not sure how I did it. Basically, I did stuff until it worked, and then I stopped doing stuff.

The performance is, sure enough, quite spritely.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

When I do a clean install of Windows I install without anything but the drive I want it booting from in the computer. I once managed to create a system where the boot sectors were on a different disk than the boot partition and the system was on yet another drive. Microsoft is just nutty.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I pick up my new build tomorrow, and I spent part of this evening backing up my documents to an external drive, so I can move them over to the new build in the next day or so. The 1tb drives are ridiculous overkill, but this time around I want to make very sure I don't short myself. And who knows what hobbies I may pick up in the next few years, right? Right?

The 2nd drive is purely for backup of the 1st drive, so I can avoid OneDrive. Any tips or recommendations for backup versus mirroring the boot disk?

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

If you find a good backup solution for Windows that doesn't suck, do let us in on it.

 

[Noodles]

The 1tb drives are ridiculous overkill, but this time around I want to make very sure I don't short myself. And who knows what hobbies I may pick up in the next few years, right? Right?

I recomend getting a copy of YoutubeDL, and hoarding live concert videos like its the end of times.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

I'm not sure how I did it. Basically, I did stuff until it worked, and then I stopped doing stuff.

Welcome to IT service desk!

But, seriously, glad you got it working.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Welcome to IT service desk!

But, seriously, glad you got it working.

Stop doing stuff is the tricky part.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Welcome to IT service desk!

My darkest suspicions are confirmed!

I've been fiddling about with computers since, no kidding, the Altair 8800:

I didn't own one, mind you -- I think that by the time you got a case and some peripherals you were talking about stratospheric amounts of money, but I did lay eyes and hands on one and see it operate. I smelled the soldering! (If you flipped those switches on the front in just the right order for a very long time you could find the square root of four, or something ... )

Side note: The guy who owned the Altair made quite a few bucks turning surplus mainframe computer gear and miscellaneous other junk into "handwriting analysis computers" with lots of blinky lights and mechanical whirring that toured around the country bilking the rubes at county fairs. He hired a few of us radio types to help with the insane amount of soldering involved. The output was (discarded) punch cards that had various vague "personality characteristics" printed on them by a mimeograph machine. Most of its performance was "programmed" by a few washing machine timers. Of course, there wasn't a computer within 10 miles of the contraption. (I'm probably going to hell for this, now that I think of it.)​

I had an Apple II before they came out with the 48k ram kit -- JFC, who would ever need that much ram? I haven't bought an assembled desktop in well over 40 years.

Yet, from time to time, I find vast deserts in the forest of my computer knowledge. Happily, I'm so damn stubborn I almost always find a way to make whatever it is work.

 

[Free]

Jim Gaffigan does "tech" comedy.

 

[Essence Lumin]

I recomend getting a copy of YoutubeDL, and hoarding live concert videos like its the end of times.

Yes, and if that doesn't work try yt-dlp. There was a time youtube-dl wasn't being developed but it seems to be now.