My Stories: Personal Writing

Nostalgia For My C: Drive
by
Vasudev Seeram

Date: January 14th, 1997

Today, my brother proposed that we should attempt to fix the problem with our old hard drive. It was coming to the end of the holidays, and he wanted to fix it before school restarted. I was not hasty; the computer could have only one hard drive attached. We would have to open up the computer, change the connections between hard drives, then update the CMOS settings. It would probably waste a lot of time too. I would rather put it off until next holidays than get involved not. At ten o’clock however, my brother informed me that he will begin his task. I decided to join him, if only for the fun of opening the computer and exploring the inside.

The problem was that we had put Stacker on the disk and the file was corrupted. However, the problem was more complex than a simple corrupted file. We had lost the specs for that HD in the past accidentally: a friend of ours had given us a game that was backed up on DOS 6. We had DOS 5. When we tried to restore his backed up file, the program wiped our drive specs. Fixing the floppy drives was easy: 3½", 1.44 MB for the A: drive and 5¼", 1.2 MB for the B: drive. The hard drive was much more difficult, since there were six numeric parameters and hundreds of resulting combinations. I made some random guesses in which were we able to read the directory, but were unable to access the files themselves.

We eventually got the HD to work by calling our vendor and obtaining the correct specs. We assumed that it would never happen again. We were wrong: Stacker went haywire and somehow it erased the HD specs.

In the directory listing, I saw many projects that I had worked on over the previous years. It is strange how sad and nostalgic I felt. I felt like I was losing a part of me. Old Basic programs, drawings, essays, things that I had created were there, but only in a shell. They appeared on the list, but could not be accessed. I tried hard to retrieve them. They were of no use to me, but somehow I was driven to save them. Alas, it was to no avail. My brother kept telling me that they were beyond repair and to clear the disk. With a heavy heart, I typed that dreaded command: FORMAT C: and pressed Enter.