• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

AST Adventure 486: Dead Drive and Lost software

T

the731272

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 16, 2015
Messages
59
Location
Bath NY
Hi everyone. I put this here because this is a 486 system that runs windows 95. According to the guidelines in the 386 + 486 section: No windows 95. So yeah. Here it is.
Pictures soon to come, but, I need to know if there is any place I can find software that would have come stock with this PC.
It would have been absolutely joyous to get the hard drive working and extract the software from it, But alas it was too far gone when I got it.
On first start, it went from clicking and doing nothing to completing a seek and throwing read errors. I managed to get a single scandisk done before the drive croaked and no longer completes a seek. I'm probably going to have to give a more specific model # to actually achieve any results with getting its software back, but if anyone has any general information on the software for it, it would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
 
Is it one of the CD-ROM equipped models? Typically, it would come with a starter selection of CDROMs, including Encarta, MS Works, and MS Publisher plus some demo software and overstock. Would vary by version and date of release.
 
I guess you might find it on E-Bay but it looks from a google search that it did vary by model and there was lots of it. At that date almost certainly Encarta as others have said..
.. I can see that some came with telephone answering software:-

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...h29bwLB#v=onepage&q=ast adventure 486&f=false
so I think getting a complete list will be fun....

p.s. Why on earth run ScanDisk. Almost guaranteed to ruin a dodgy drive. I would have tried and get an Image with Ghost or R-Studio or even Microsoft Disk2VHD. Perhaps expensive , but worth it it. Other imaging tools are available.
 
Thanks for the list, and I wouldn't have known ScanDisk could brick a drive. What causes that? Also, I did try to get an image, but it was too late. Blargh.
 
I use `ddrescue` which comes standard/available in the repos for most Linux distros. It does a good job of extracting what it can, and will build a logfile for retrying (potentially in later runs, even) bad areas of the drive. It operates on the assumption that this may be the last time you ever get anything from the drive.
 
ScanDisk is OK at recovering damage because a system has crashed and not flushed things to disk and so corrupted the file system, but if a disk is failing any attempt to recover the file system is likely to cause more corruption.

If you do a surface scan for bad sectors that means it tries to read every track on the disk. If in doing so the head touches the disk then any existing damage will be made worse. If the motor is seizing up then running it will make it slow more. If writes are failing and it tries to correct file system errors then it will further corrupt the disk,. As you said "it was too late" so try and recover the data as quickly as possible so its not too late :)

I don't think you would have been successful in this case, but you might have got some data off.

Sadly I can't find any info about the bundled software which is a pity. As you say it would be nice to have it back in all its glory. Lots of adverts for the system but no lists of software anywhere.
 
glitch said:
I use `ddrescue` which comes standard/available in the repos for most Linux distros. It does a good job of extracting what it can, and will build a logfile for retrying (potentially in later runs, even) bad areas of the drive. It operates on the assumption that this may be the last time you ever get anything from the drive.
Click to expand...

That sounds usefull. I have an old copy of R-Studio I got several existences ago, but its old. It makes a sector based image like "ddrescue" and has tools to recover files from FAT and NTFS file systems in the image.
 
Ahhh that makes sense. I suppose my thinking in the matter at the time is that the drive was recovered enough so that the only damage it would permanently sustained would have been bad sectors. I suppose I over-estimated the durability of the drive, and hard drives in general. Thanks for looking though!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top