Biggest odd-ball mistake?
OK, hand up, who here really believed I would stop posting? LOL
I thought of this when reading the thread on ripoffs, but I don't think this constitutes a ripoff but just incredible stupidity.
I went to a client's site to work on a Windows 98 PC. There were a couple problems I couldn't quite figure out:
Windows listed two hard drives, although I figured it was just partitioned. It showed a 2G FAT drive and a 500MB FAT drive. But on bootup, the BIOS showed a single 512MB IDE drive. Compression? Not set up. And why was Windows 98 set up with FAT drives anyway?
I booted to a DOS prompt and looked in FDISK. It showed one partition of 2GB on one drive. FDISK saw no other drives. The 2GB partition was on a drive that FDISK saw as a 512MB drive.
By now I was pretty confused, so I opened the case, which had no screws in it. There were in fact two drives, one 500 MB set up as a master on the secondary IDE, and one 8.4 GB Seagate set up as maste on the Primary! Now I am seriously going, WTF???
So...I rebooted Windows and backed up all their data. I asked the person in charge if any changes had been made to it since it was installed. He said no, that it was put in place by the company that built it (it was a little clone shop, white boxes) and hadn't been messed with since. It was set up with a scanner for scanning pictures. The initial complaint was that it was running slow and also running out of room. Why, I asked, didn't you call the company. We did, he replied, but they have gone out of business.
No wonder. The funny thing is, there is a sticker on the front of the case with the company's logo that says "10 years of quality!" Hmm...
He's up and running now with a single 8.4Gb Fat32 partition and very happy about it.
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R. Bret Walker, CNE
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