Weaver VS World

Weaver VS. The Dominator

2009.11.13

Weaver

• Height: 6'
• Weight: 195 lbs.
• Armed: Screwdriver, Wits
• Weakness: Temper

MOLD-RITE 2100fx DOMINATOR

• Height: 1' 4"
• Weight: 28 lbs.
• Armed: DOS 6.22 (Upgraded), FAT16 Filesystem
• Weakness: 2 GiB Max Partition Size (FAT16)

There is nothing I enjoy more than seeing a person, obviously defeated, walk into my office and place a piece of hardware that is 20+ years old on my desk with instructions "Here, fix this" ... on Friday the 13th.

Between the whine of the spindle motor bearings and the look of defeat on those that tried before I knew I was in for a treat.

It is not too often in 2009 that MS-DOS skills come in handy. Today I was happy that I spent so much time in DOS as a boy, hiding porn in compressed and password protected zip files courtesy of Phil Katz (R.I.P.) and PKWare, Inc.

With the PLC control application unable to launch I spent a few minutes figuring out how the pre-launch tests were conducted in the launch batch file and soon noticed that the main system drive was out of disk space. Empty, nada, zilch... 0 bytes free.

It was at this point that I got to thinking about how there was a time when operating systems could run with zero hard disk space available. They wouldn't freeze, the kernel wouldn't panic, life would go on. Days go by.

Spoke with the client and informed them of our plan to pull the drive, clone, and expand the partition to 2 GiB.

Wham, bam, thank you ma'am and a little DOS foo and the PLC control PC was back in business.

Winner: Weaver

-John "This is not in my job description. This BIOS better support LBA" Urbanek

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