The Magical Excel 97 Far East Language Build Screwdriver

[kstrauser]

Last week, a PC in my wife's medical office wouldn't boot, with the dreaded "no drive detected" error message. Figuring "what do we have to lose", I turned it off cracked the case, started whacking the C: drive with a screwdriver handle, and punched the power.

It booted.

The office manager who was watching me had to pick her jaw up off the floor. We proceeded to copy everything possibly important off it onto a USB drive, knowing that may well have been its last spin-up ever and it's next power off may be the final one.

[gopalv]

> whacking the C: drive with a screwdriver handle, and punched the power.

Disk heads have been "sticking" like that forever[1], I guess. And it's a good bit that it will stick back down soon and plow right into a set of cylinders.

And the internals of disks have gotten more finicky (helium filled), faster spinning aerodynamically lifted heads etc.

[1] - http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010326

[hermitdev]

Could also have been a loose cable. Completely unplug (both ends) all the cables, and then plug them back in. I've had cables come loose over the years, especially back in the IDE days. It's easy to overlook, because the cables can look like they're properly seated.

[abawany]

I had to do this with a Quantum drive in an old 90s Mac - my approach was to hold it horizontally and rotate the drive aggressively to try to unstick the platters. Worked well but we also copied stuff off of it asap after that.

[duxup]

While in college I worked tech support for a pc manufacturer. Western Digital had a 1G drive that regularly would just seize up due to some sort of issue.

The short term fix was exactly as you describe. Give the drive a few strong hits and it would resume spinning.

[madhadron]

I remember my mother calling me with a machine that was making horrible noises and shutting down randomly. I told her to kick it. It took a few minutes for her to believe me. And she did. And the noises went away and it worked fine. I don't think I ever explained to her why I prescribed that remedy...

[phs318u]

Haha yeah. We used to call that “percussive maintenance”.

[bitwize]

Reminds me of the good old ST506. Lost quite a few files to the gummy lube on that drive.

[piinbinary]

That reminds me of the story about the magic switch: http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

[C1sc0cat]

Great story though you could have just pulled out the switch and soldered the wires together :-)

I look forward to the practical soldering test for developers at FANG's - every one on here can solder right.

[bdcravens]

> I look forward to the practical soldering test for developers at FANG's

This seems equivalent to whiteboarding algorithms that you'll never use.

FWIW, I'm 42, have built and repaired many, many computers over the years, dating to 286's, and I've never picked up a solder iron.

[kop316]

That was my reaction too. Maybe I just work much more in hardware, but if I came across that issue, I would have just pulled out the wires for the switch and soldered a new one on there.

Is there something I am missing?

[wlesieutre]

No soldering required, the motherboard wants a momentary contact to tell it to boot. Soldering the wires together would be more like pressing and holding it.

[chungy]

Office 97 actually gives me a little bit of nostalgia. It's the last version for me that actually felt pleasant to use (assuming you turn off Clippy, which isn't much of a barrier).

[frabert]

When I was a little kid and started using computers for the first time, Office 97 was one of the only programs installed on my family's PC. I swear the only reason I ever opened Office was for Clippy and its fellow animated characters :)

[CoolGuySteve]

Peak Office imo is whichever Office version introduced that blue underline that let you immediately undo whatever frustrating autoformatting catastrophe was just inflicted by hitting the tab key or resizing an image.

I think it was 2002?

Everything afterwards feels like change for change's sake. But I haven't used any version after 2016, thankfully, so maybe they finally got collaborative online editing or less obtuse revision tracking.

[rat9988]

>assuming you turn off Clippy, which isn't much of a barrier

It was a high barrier for my young self.

[rootsudo]

The fun part is that there is def a disconnect between the dev team and hardware itself (or help desk). To resolve the issue, you only needed to short two jumpers on the motherboard to get it to turn on.

If it was a NON-ACPI hardware, then the hardware switch was wired into the power supply itself, which, then again you could've undone the cable and connect the circuit to boot the computer.

[hawkesnest]

I would imagine that a build machine for Office 97 would be of the pre-ATX days and have the switch wired directly to the power supply. Like a clicker-style pen, those power buttons were often push-on-push-off, and occasionally the mechanism would break. Jamming something, like a screwdriver, into the power switch hole would be a completely acceptable thing to do for a one-off.

It probably took a little time for the initial panic to wear off and allow the folks doing the build to realize it was a simple matter. The thought "we may not be able to" is a bit of a reach. At worst they could swap power supplies or whatnot.

[PowerfulWizard]

Yeah I used a computer for years with no case, to turn it on all you have to do is briefly short 2 pins on the front panel connector. Although once inside a case it can be pretty awkward to access.

[bdcravens]

Back when I had some Bitcoin GPU rigs (2011), my setup used 2 wires connecting those jumpers to a cheap push button switch.

[klyrs]

In high school, circa '97, I was working in a computer lab. As I entered the room, I was rapidly admonished "don't touch the table!" So naturally, I reached out, tenderly as possible, brushed the table with my fingertip. Sure enough, the computer immediately reboots. He cusses a blue streak, as he's been trying to install Windows but folks kept touching the table! I regret not talking him through the issue, because obviously nobody would use such a flaky machine... but I'd (quite reasonbly) lost his goodwill in my initial mischeviousness. To this day I don't know how the machine was so sensitive to, presumably, a miniscule change in capacitance. There's a possibly that it wasn't grounded and I was carrying a nontrivial electrostatic charge, but the table surface was insulating!

[Theodores]

Turning off the computer or putting it in suspend mode is somewhat expected nowadays unless it is a server in a rack that runs untold virtual machines that get 'spun up' as needed.

Back in 1997 the idea of turning of an specialist idle PC that consumed company electricity was not the done thing to do. If you were a lowly office worker using Office 97 or its ancestors then you would turn off your machine at the end of the day and start the day with a ten minute boot time. It took a long time to get these efficiencies right and a silly amount of time was wasted. CRT monitors ruled the roost back then too, after 6 you would see lots of silly Microsoft OpenGL screensavers running.

I wonder what the actual power consumption is these days compared to then? It could be a factor of ten.

[beering]

I'm surprised there weren't backups they could've restored? If the difficulty was setting up the build environment correctly, then even a duplicate hard drive for each build server would've saved them from a pinch.

[michaelhoffman]

Office 97 is older than my undergraduate students. That's so weird.

[bdamm]

The amusing but strange sub-story here is the build engineer claiming that the product may never be built. That is a type of endemic first class whining the type of which I am sick, sick, sick of.

[PhaseLockk]

To me, that appeared to simply be effective communication. Raising a potentially serious issue early rather than waiting until all options have been exhausted and giving the security lead no time to react. Had they not been able to succeed, the advance notice could help in getting other resources moving in advance of the internal or external deadline.

[dang]

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here, and especially not ragey ones.

You could make a good comment out of this by replacing the second sentence with some more specific observations.

[IronWolve]

Amazed nobody thought of virtualizing the old hardware.

[ohazi]

In 1997?