[Ham-Computers] Blind Dude Blunders! Help!

[jeff]

Duane Fischer, W8DBF wrote:
> Since it is an antique by computer senility standards, even the hackers 
> leave it alone!

Don't be so sure.


> Since I wrote about 90% of the software programs that I use, and learned 
> to program when 16K of RAM was standard and 48K was huge, 

I've been following your saga for a while and it occurs to me that you 
can make good use of some current technology.  I don't know if you're 
familiar with virtualization, but it might be something to consider.

With your current setup, ideally you'd need to either have the original 
disks or the entire setup backed up to a hard drive or other media.  At 
very least, you'd need the configs.  You can get open source or 
commercial software (like Ghost) to make an exact copy of your hard 
drive and put it away somewhere.

With virtualization, you create a fresh system as a virtual machine. 
You make a copy of the VM (it's a few files) and keep it somewhere safe. 
  This way if the running copy gets corrupted or murdered, you can pop a 
fresh copy in and be running in no time.  There is also software that 
will make a copy of your running system for virtualization.

Once you have a VM, you can run it on almost any hardware and operating 
system.  I prefer Vmware, but there's also MS Virtual PC, QEMU, 
VirtualBox, Xen, and others.  I can run any VM under Windows or linux - 
it doesn't matter.  There are Mac VM's too, but they're expensive.

In essence, a VM will let you preserve an old OS forever.


Regardless, please take this event as a shot across your bow.  Do what's 
necessary to safeguard your system before something really goes wrong.


Best of luck,
-jeff


-------------------------------------------------

blog: ThermionicEmissions
http://www.lockergnome.com/leftystrat

SO's guide to DID/MPD
http://www.op.net/~jeffv/so1.htm