# Park Your Hard Drive



## ShaneW

Was cleaning out the storeroom today and came across a few really old PC's.. XTs and ATs. Had a good chuckle remembering having to park my hard drive every night before bed.
I will never forget, I must been about 8 yrs old, my dad would stick his head into my room every night and ask... did you remember to park the hard drive before you turned the computer off.... yesssss dad if I remember correctly this wasn't even a standard DOS function, you had to have the software.

For those of you that don't know what this is... a hard drive has an arm much like the old record players. By parking the drive, you are returning the arm to it's rest position so it can't scratch the disk if bumped. Of course this is no longer necessary as it is done automatically.

Spent hours playing Aladdin, eagles nest, police quest, space quest, leisure suit larry, etc

Geez we have a come a long way since then

Reactions: Like 4 | Agree 1


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## ShaneW

Was cleaning out the storeroom today and came across a few really old PC's.. XTs and ATs. Had a good chuckle remembering having to park my hard drive every night before bed.
I will never forget, I must been about 8 yrs old, my dad would stick his head into my room every night and ask... did you remember to park the hard drive before you turned the computer off.... yesssss dad if I remember correctly this wasn't even a standard DOS function, you had to have the software.

For those of you that don't know what this is... a hard drive has an arm much like the old record players. By parking the drive, you are returning the arm to it's rest position so it can't scratch the disk if bumped. Of course this is no longer necessary as it is done automatically.

Spent hours playing Aladdin, eagles nest, police quest, space quest, leisure suit larry, etc

Geez we have a come a long way since then

Reactions: Like 1 | Agree 1


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## Rowan Francis

i used to have my first BIG harddrive as a door stop , it was a 350MB drive that weighed like 25kgs

Reactions: Funny 2


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## Spyker

My first PC contained a 10*MB *MFM drive. It still had 2 ribbon cables that carried data!


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## Robert Howes

Then you must remember these. We had a 6pack and thought we were main because we had 256Meg.


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## Spyker

OOHH! a Disc pack! Now that is old!


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## Robert Howes

I was 17 when I started as computer techie so that was 26 years ago.

Reactions: Like 1


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## Spyker

For the young guys on here, that was the first removable HDD. You actually removed the plastic case containing the disc platters and put them in another machine.


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## Reinvanhardt

I don't remember the arm function but I do remember playing the old games like Dangerous Dave, Jill in the Jungle, One Must Fall, Prince of Persia etc. Was a great era!

Reactions: Agree 3


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## TylerD

Reinvanhardt said:


> I don't remember the arm function but I do remember playing the old games like Dangerous Dave, Jill in the Jungle, One Must Fall, Prince of Persia etc. Was a great era!


And California Games and Street rod. Was awesome.

Reactions: Like 1 | Agree 2


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## ShaneW

Yeah... prince of Persia(not Aladdin) and California games

Reactions: Agree 1


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## ShaneW

Oops I seem to have created this thread twice, could an admin please fix


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## crack2483

Too many to name. Police quest, monkey island, scorched earth, chuck yeager, lhx, Larry, Ian bothams cricket, sheesh even sim ant lol. Oh and alley cat.

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## ET

guess what my one mate just finished building?

Reactions: Like 5


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## Derick

Whatever you do, don't try and run those old park programs on a modern day harddrive - the results are not pretty. BTW these days harddrives park automatically on shutdown


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## ShaneW

Derick said:


> Whatever you do, don't try and run those old park programs on a modern day harddrive - the results are not pretty. BTW these days harddrives park automatically on shutdown



Now I'm intrigued... What exactly happens @Derick ? I've got a drive I'm prepared to sacrifice in the name of science


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## Derick

ShaneW said:


> Now I'm intrigued... What exactly happens @Derick ? I've got a drive I'm prepared to sacrifice in the name of science


Ha, well possibly these days hard drives might be 'smart' enough to prevent any issues, but when we did it on the first 'auto-park' hard drive that came out, the software program gave the hardrive instructions to move to a certain position - which didn't exist on the harddrive, but it tried anyway, basically causing a lot of scratching noises and one crashed hard drive


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## ShaneW

Now to figure out how to get the park software off the 1.2Mb floppy drive. Tried folding it over a few times and jamming into the USB port... not working for some reason

Reactions: Funny 5


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## Derick

ShaneW said:


> Now to figure out how to get the park software off the 1.2Mb floppy drive. Tried folding it over a few times and jamming into the USB port... not working for some reason


Ha, my dad is a bit of a hoarder and he still has floppy drives on his machine

Reactions: Like 1


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## Spyker

ShaneW said:


> Now to figure out how to get the park software off the 1.2Mb floppy drive. Tried folding it over a few times and jamming into the USB port... not working for some reason



It will fit in the CDROM. Just open the drive and put it in. Trust me!

Reactions: Funny 3


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## Die Kriek

Showing some age here gents . I had to Google most of the stuff mentioned here, and I work with PCs!

Reactions: Funny 3


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## Derick

Die Kriek said:


> Showing some age here gents . I had to Google most of the stuff mentioned here, and I work with PCs!


haha man - yep I did work on dual floppy drive machines and my first HD was 20mb and I hated windows and only finally upgraded from dos to windows 95 when I bought a game that could only run on windows
good times

Reactions: Like 1 | Agree 1


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## ShaneW

I remember copying mortal kombat when Windows 95 1st came out. 48 hard disks, using ARJ, and the second last one had a CRC error a whole day wasted

Reactions: Like 1 | Winner 1 | Funny 2


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## Cat

shees, i'd forgotten about that. park.com


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## Cat

ohh! ARJ - loved it. so cool.

Derick, yes, back in the day - late 1980s and i worked part-time at a company that built and sold PC's, Windows was for running that...some or other DTP program. Then i got into Windows - and then got stuck in corporate world of micorsoft, because i was too slack to move myself to UNIX - just what happened with the skill set, and Linux hadn't really happened yet.

PS: Sometimes i like to tell people, i've been using internet since 1989, and they think it only came out in 1995; but i had an account on a server at university, dialup connection from home PC. i used to work on code and then upload it to the unix box to compile. 
No www, just email and usenet forums.


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## Derick

Heh, yep I started as a programmer back int he 80's, but there was no work really in PC programming yet - so I went to IBM mainframes... guess what I'm still doing


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## BumbleBee

Also started on a hardriveless dual floppy contraption in the early 90's, small little 10 or 12 inch mono screen.... amber. I remember it costing R8000 back then. Oh and the keyboards, those weren't keys, they were switches! Ah the days of autoexec.bat files


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## Spyker

Derick said:


> Heh, yep I started as a programmer back int he 80's, but there was no work really in PC programming yet - so I went to IBM mainframes... guess what I'm still doing



AS/400?


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## Derick

BumbleBee said:


> Also started on a hardriveless dual floppy contraption in the early 90's, small little 10 or 12 inch mono screen.... amber. I remember it costing R8000 back then. Oh and the keyboards, those weren't keys, they were switches! Ah the days of autoexec.bat files


don't forget config.sys - you really had to tweak it to get the most out of your 640k memory

Reactions: Like 1 | Agree 1


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## Derick

Spyker said:


> AS/400?


nope IBM 370 - only 7 companies in SA left that uses them, so my job opportunities are scarce to say the least


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## Spyker

Derick said:


> don't forget config.sys - you really had to tweak it to get the most out of your 640k memory



And what a stupid limitation that was!


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## Spyker

Derick said:


> nope IBM 370 - only 7 companies in SA left that uses them, so my job opportunities are scarce to say the least



370's are ancient! Does that make you ancient as well?


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## Derick

Spyker said:


> 370's are ancient! Does that make you ancient as well?


haha yep it does, most of my co-workers are over 40, and a good chunk over 50 - and yep 370's are ancient in a sense that they were created a long time ago, but they still make new models with improvements every few years and they can still kick any Windows server farm's ass when it comes to pure brute performance - which what these 7 companies need - they are basically all the banks, the JSE and companies related to the JSE


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## Spyker

Derick said:


> haha yep it does, most of my co-workers are over 40, and a good chunk over 50 - and yep 370's are ancient in a sense that they were created a long time ago, but they still make new models with improvements every few years and they can still kick any Windows server farm's ass when it comes to pure brute performance - which what these 7 companies need - they are basically all the banks, the JSE and companies related to the JSE



So you are the man to talk to when I want my bank balance increased?


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## Derick

Spyker said:


> So you are the man to talk to when I want my bank balance increased?


Ha, you will be surprised how many people get caught every week trying to do just that - when I worked at one of the banks they had a weekly e-mail go out about this week's arrests.
But currently I'm at the JSE - well, I work for the company that the JSE hired to handle the mainframe, as they did not want to handle it in house anymore

Reactions: Like 1


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## ET

Spyker said:


> It will fit in the CDROM. Just open the drive and put it in. Trust me!



cdrom? isn't that where the coffee cup goes?

Reactions: Funny 1


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## Derick

denizenx said:


> cdrom? isn't that where the coffee cup goes?


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## crack2483

BumbleBee said:


> Also started on a hardriveless dual floppy contraption in the early 90's, small little 10 or 12 inch mono screen.... amber. I remember it costing R8000 back then. Oh and the keyboards, those weren't keys, they were switches! Ah the days of autoexec.bat files



Funny how things change, the more they stay the same. "Mechanical" keyboards are all the rage now. Have a coolermaster one myself.

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## Rex_Bael

ShaneW said:


> I remember copying mortal kombat when Windows 95 1st came out. 48 hard disks, using ARJ, and the second last one had a CRC error a whole day wasted



I had a frustratingly similar experience, Warcraft 2 on 24 stiffies with the last one corrupted

Reactions: Like 1


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## Riaz

i know not what you guys speak of LOL

Reactions: Funny 1


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## Ollypop

Oh wow. You guys really suffered back in the day. I've only used a floppy / stiffy once in my life. I don't know what the difference between a floppy and a stiffy is actually. And I've never had to park a drive. Things sure we're different when I was a foetus. 

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## johan

I think I should book myself in at an old age home, played with of the first zenith and IBM's when on varsity already!


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