#old systems

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[ygmtwr-atrus]

The trick, by the way, of lying to a hard drive about what capacity it's supposed to be, to use it into the dirt, isn't just keeping the disk check from stopping you...

It's recognizing WHY the disk check wants to stop you when a drive has too many bad sectors...

Because the drive is failing. You can lose and corrupt files very easily. You can fry the whole drive. any writing and rewriting is slowly eating your disk.

So you only use it to store simple things that can easily be recovered if the file is corrupted like word files, and you save multiple copies of those files across the disk, and preferably have them all automatically back up, such as with partitioning.

And in my defense I was doing it because I needed a computer to do school work on at home. School work that only had to last to be handed in, and a text journal [well to be fair the failing hard drive might have been less corruptible memory than my own brain at various points]. Oh and everything was small enough to be backed up on floppies too.

I also used to do things like encounter text files with extensions my computer didn't know how to open, or that were corrupted, open them with program compiling software like the compilers used for school projects, and then copy out and reformat the text in a free word program that I -did- have access to. Usually notepad. I'd use find and replace functions to edit out a lot of the code that ended up in with the text when I could.

I would just hop word files between computer systems that didn't have any words programs in common this way like complex formats made by programs the school paid for, and that I didn't have at home, just didn't matter, and I never explained any of this to my teachers, some of whom were very convinced we would not be capable of working on some things at home.

Most often I ended up using it to open fic I had saved from a system that had a fancier word program that I didn't have on the computer I put together at home.

I used the get random motherboards from people that had been laying around for a year or longer that I had to look up the pin configuration for, or figure it out through trial and error and educated guesses.

Kids these days just aren't getting up to that kind of nonsense.

It's all ipads and smart phones.

Also maybe worth noting that my father taught me none of this. He worked on military air craft and made his own circuitboards as a hobby, and was a well paid system's administrator, but I had to teach myself all these things from scratch after leaving home with whatever computer access I could gain through the school and second hand parts.

Imagine what I could have done with guidance and support.

All the other people my age interested in these things were 'boys' and I was a 'girl' [tans masc here, but never mind that] and so when I did things like express an interest in using what I knew of programing to try getting into something like white-hat hacking, guys would make comments on how I "wanted to be a code kitten, hur hur" [someone who copies and pasts code without understanding it]... And they'd say things like "figuring out a motherboard's pin configuration without the original manual is impossible" and take my claims to the contrary as evidence I must be lying.

Imagine though if I had peers I could bounce things off of.

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