 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Traps for Young Players Tom Coleman |
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This story is essentially true. Only some trivial diversions have been deleted in the interest of brevity.
Phone rings: "Help! Help! My computer has died."
I dart into a nearby telephone booth, put on my working gear and zoom off to the rescue, leaping tall buildings with a single bound. Booting off drive C: gives a blank screen with a flashing cursor in the top left corner.
Boot from drive A: with floppy. Everything comes up ok.
C: (ENTER)
Nothing, no files no subdirectories. The disk in drive C: has no label.
All gone. Bald
With great cunning I fire up The Norton Utilities and - lo and behold there are 513 erased files in drive C: root directory.
Too much there. Lets look at a subdirectory.
That's strange, there are no subdirectories.
By now my mind is caving in under fantasies of a new frenzied virus. How do you remove the subdirectories, leaving no trace, and leave the files behind even if they have been deleted. (I have visions of that trick of pulling the table cloth out from under the dishes.) I ask the owner "Give me the names of a couple of your subdirectories".
"I could never work them out so I didn't bother with subdirectories." The penny drops.
After a little judicious questioning I put together what had happened. He had a number of floppies that had been used as scratch disks and wanted to tidy them up and recover them. This is how he did it, more or less.
C:> DIR A:
(Directory of files is displayed.)
Might need that. Put it aside. Place another disk in drive a:
C:> DIR A:
(Directory of files is displayed)
What a lot of rubbish - don't need any of that.
C:> DEL *.*
Put new disk in drive A:
C:> DIR A:
(Directory of files is displayed)
And so on and so forth.
At the end of the session he turns the power off. Talk about traps for young players. I showed him how to use Norton to recover essential files, gave him details of our DOS courses, and left him sobbing into his keyboard.
(If you don't know what went wrong, study the sequence of commands. Learning by discovery ensures a 100% retention.)
Reprinted from the October 1990 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
