Computer data destroyed
Computer data destroyed
Over the past seven years I have built-up an impressive
collection of carefully selected commercial programs and high
quality children's games on my home desktop computer. The
programs occupied about 800 Mb on two stacked hard disks. Very
young children could start any program from the menu, even if the
config.sys file needed to be changed. It took hundreds of hours
to perfect the total system.
On June 2, 1995, I asked Laser Computer (Jalan Melawai Raya No
21 Blok M), South Jakarta, to install a sound card and CD-ROM.
The technician checked all partitions, so he knew that the two
hard disks contained a very large amount of data, but he did not
tell me that the installation would cause any problems. I knew
that, after the hardware had been bolted in place, it was only
necessary to add a few lines to the autoexec.bat and config.sys
file and resolve any hardware conflicts using the software
provided by the manufacturer of the CD-ROM. The operation was a
success but the perfectly healthy patient died. Over a period of
six days the people at Laser:
* Reformatted both hard disks.
* Erased all my files. They did make a partial backup of the
files, but could restore only 30 percent of them, so I lost all
the configuration files I had worked so hard to develop, plus my
extensive DOS and Windows menu systems.
Infected the computer with the DH2 virus.
* Didn't configure the sound card to work under Windows
* Replaced DOS 5.0 with DOS 6.2
* Replaced Stacker 3.0 with Stacker 3.1
* Forgot to add the EMM386 command to config.sys so that,
under DOS, only 440 kb of RAM was available, too little to run
some programs.
On the third day of this fiasco I discovered that the
technicians could only boot my computer using a virus-infected
floppy disk and could not repair the hard disk because Stacker
had write-protected it to prevent further vandalism. It should
have been possible, according to the Stacker manual, to use
CHKDSK/F to repair the damaged FAT and remove the write
protection. The virus could then have been removed, the copy of
command.com destroyed by the virus could have been replaced and
important commands from my original config.sys file could have
been added. It was probably too late for such simple remedies
because I suspect that the problem was caused by Laser's
unnecessary, botched attempt to install DOS 6.2. The CD-ROM
manual states clearly that DOS 5.0 is adequate. None of that
explains why Laser reformatted the second hard disk which did not
contain the operating system.
Restoring the system to its former condition is slow and
extremely frustrating because of the condition of my original
floppy disks. Some programs only permit a limited number of
installations. Some disks are damaged by fungus while others were
formatted on ancient disk drives which are not compatible with my
latest floppy drive. Twenty percent to 30 percent of my programs
will be lost forever because they are no longer being sold. It
was to avoid such problems that I installed all my software on
two hard disks.
It is impractical to back-up on floppy disk the very high
capacity hard disks necessary for multimedia so it's wise to
invest a few hundred dollars in a tape back-up system. It is not
only Laser that regards reformatting of the hard disk as the
standard method for "fixing" software problems they don't
understand.
BOB ATTRIDGE
Jakarta