Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Well, that's it. The heads look good & clean, & they're on right, all the cables are firmly seated right, the belt's having no trouble turning the spindle, & all but one of the boot disks I tried are good & readable. I changed drives & moved the belt to it, & same thing. The computer's just refusing to boot.

Make backups, folks! Here's softing Microfuck's instructions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17143/windows-10-back-up-your-files

How, exactly, does the most powerful Micro[computer]-Soft[ware] company in the world let a major update release to the general public with the side effect of

DELETE

FUCKING

EVERYTHING

in the locations they've spent the last 20+ years telling everyone to use!?

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/10/05/avoid-windows-10-october-update-until-you-do-one-thing/#7c2962373e79

- https://twitter.com/coolKevinator/status/1047714803127476225

- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-files/windows-10-october-2018-update-version-1809/1a924008-ddba-48db-a96f-7b4bfef9039a

- https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-october-update-problems-wiped-docs-plus-intel-driver-warning/

I got the belt back, but they sanded the new belt down to the correct width instead of replacing it. Eh, whatever works.

I installed it in one of my bad-belt floppy drives, and it's actually grabbing the spindle enough to grab the metal hub & spin the mylar disc! Progress!

But the drive isn't reading any of my boot disks. Bummer. Next step: Check the heads & hope I didn't break one.
💾

If you're able to pry off the LRFs (Little Rubber Feet) without dirtying or damaging the sticky stuff & without leaving any sticky stuff behind, you can use a clean backing sheet for stickers or peel-off stick-on labels to keep the LRFs clean & easy to peel off when it comes time to put them back on the computer.

Make sure to peel off any sticker chaff first if you use a sticker sheet. You don't want to stick the LRFs to any sticker parts, only backing parts.

Life-Hecker

The lesson I took away from that mistake was to write-protect the source disk before thinking of starting a copy.

That force of habit is still with me today. If I format, image, or copy anything & have more than one SD card involved (including micro-SDs in SD dongles), I flip the tab to "Lock" on the source card.

The worst computer mistake I ever made was on my C64, way back when I had only one floppy drive. I wanted to make a backup copy of a disk, & the disk copying program I was using had to format the backup first. It was halfway done with the format phase when I realized I was holding the blank floppy in my hand and that the disk I wanted to copy was being formatted.

This is in my ~/.shrc on BSD to keep me from accidentally nuking or clobbering files I forget are there:

alias cp='cp -ip'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'

This also works in ~/.bashrc for bash, & with GNU versions of cp (except `cp -p` preserves different file attributes), mv, & rm.

"Interact with this post if you remember _______"

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, your kid might have to explain why they got 8-tracks, disco albums on any medium, and/or pet rocks.