Near catastrophe

Today I was tidying up the desktop PC, you know, emptying the trash, dusting in the corners. I re-formatted the "old" hard drive... this computer was bought last year, and my previous computer had an 80 G hard drive that had tons of photos, documents, etc. on it, and I couldn't think of any good way to transfer them en mass. So we had the Geek guys put the old hard drive into the new computer, which thus has a C: drive (new) with a partitioned D: drive for system backup/restore, and now also a K: drive (old). Now I wanted to wipe the old drive so that I can use it for file backups, and the simplest way was to reformat. No problem doing that. Then I updated Spy Sweeper to the newest version, and after that it needed to be restarted. When it restarted it only got to the boot screen and showed a message, "Failure of hard drive is imminent! Back up files and replace drive!" Not a good thing. But I realized the "failing" drive was the 80 G old drive, that it was apparently trying to install the operating system from a blank drive. But, knowing that it had made the K: drive a "master" instead of a "slave", and putting it right was two different things. I sweated for an hour until I finally got to the screen that identifies hardware, and moved the 80 G from position one to position two. Then, at last, it would boot. What I wonder is, has the computer been booting from K: all along, but since the OS was on it too, from the original computer, it worked fine? I dunno. As long as it works now, I'll go with the flow...

I just love M$Windows, don't you? I should note, the re-formatting has to be done from the (ta da!) MS-DOS command prompt screen. I felt fortunate to remember how to do that, because for sure nothing on Windows tells you how. I remember when, with our first computer, a 286-16, **everything** was done in MS-DOS (no windows back then), and to get games to run you had to mess with extended and expanded memory, with LOADHIGH commands in your config.sys file or the autoexec.bat file, that would preserve the (imagine!) 256K low memory for use. I'm amazed they ever actually sold computers that were so cumbersome and user-unfriendly. Of course, all PCs still run MS-DOS, but Windows is "laid over" it so that its functioning is transparent to the user. Gone, but not gone. Sort of like a toothache.

Oh wait, our first computer was a TI-99 (Texas Instruments, who have gone back to making calculators these days). It cost $100 and ran programs that were on cassette tapes that you stuck in the back. Basically, you put a blank tape in, typed in your program and saved it to the tape. Whee. I think it's still up in the attic somewhere, maybe it will be collectible some day....