Mike Chambers
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2006
- Messages
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No kidding. I remember lugging around PS/2 Model 80s at my first real computer job. I'm sure they've gotten heavier in my memory as time has gone by, but I remember some of them weighing more than 50 pounds.
I got into a situation in 1997 or so where it looked like I might have had to ship one. Long story, but the short version was the IT staff decommissioned a Model 80 that had been a server, but neglected to go back and pick it up. So someone turned it back on and continued to use it. Months (maybe even a couple of years) later, my phone rang. They couldn't access "the K drive." I didn't have that drive on my cheatsheet of what servers hosted what shares. I asked around, and my coworkers said, "We decommissioned that ages ago." The drive had crashed, but a user with a lot of political clout had data on it, so we were ordered to ship the thing to Ontrack. Yes, they could handle an EDSI drive. Yes, they could handle OS/2 and HPFS386 even. But Microchannel? They said they needed us to send the controller, and might need us to send them a machine. Fortunately they were able to track down a Microchannel machine to put the controller in, so we didn't have to ship a Model 80 monstrosity halfway across the country.
I think we ended up paying upwards of $1,000 to recover 300 megs of data. Ouch. But to their credit, they got every bit of it.
yeah Ontrack supposedly does great recovery work. you're right though, most of these are over 50 pounds once you have a second hard drive and a CD drive thrown in. just the thought of moving it from the back seat of my car around the yard to the basement ellicits a groan from me.