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