[benjaminpv]

That feeling of absolute dread, thinking 'my parents are gonna kill me when they realize I killed the family computer' did a lot to prepare me for the white-knuckle experience of troubleshooting problems in Production. :)

Bless the talented engineers that put together last-ditch recovery methods and bless the folks that documented things well enough to let us make use of them.

[BizarroLand]

My first family computer was a Tandy 386-sx that came with DOS 5.0.

Not soon after, we got an update to DOS 6.22, which also came with Doublespace, an on the fly disk compression system, which upgraded our 80mb hard drive to 116 glorious megabytes.

A few months later, I did something stupid and decided to reinstall everything from scratch. Used a boot disk and formatted the hard drive, tried to reinstall DOS 5.0 and the hard drive reported that it only had 2 Megabytes of storage available.

Instant panic mode.

I had no internet, I had the manual for DOS 5.0 and 6.22 and about 6 hours before my mom got home from her night job before I got murdered.

After frantically reading page after page of documentation, I found that once Doublespace is activated, the hard drive only has enough normal readable room to launch Doublespace, not to launch DOS.

A bit more reading, and I found that I could make a DOS 6.22 bootable floppy disk with the Doublespace system on it, so that is what I did.

Breathlessly I booted the PC with the floppy and it worked! Full disk file size visible! I hurriedly opened Doublespace, de-doublespaced the drive, and rebooted.

From there it was a race against time to reinstall DOS 5.0 (from 5 disks), install the DOS 6.22 update (3 disks), install Windows 3.11 (8 MORE disks), install all of the other software (12-15 disks in total) and then make sure everything was signed in and set up before the garage door opened.

I was literally putting the finishing touches on everything when my mom surprised me by walking in the front door. She had parked in the driveway instead of the garage. She looked at me, asked me what I was doing to the computer, and I told her that I had messed something up and her solitaire history had been deleted (which was true).

She said it was ok and went to bed and I collapsed after a marathon 8 hour blind computer repair.