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

 

[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

 

[Rowan Francis]

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

 

[Spyker]

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

 

[Robert Howes]

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

 

[Spyker]

OOHH! a Disc pack! Now that is old!

 

[Robert Howes]

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

 

[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.

 

[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!

 

[TylerD]

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.

 

[ShaneW]

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

 

[ShaneW]

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

 

[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.

Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk

 

[ET]

guess what my one mate just finished building?

 

[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

 

[ShaneW]

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

 

[Derick]

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

 

[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

 

[Derick]

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

 

[Spyker]

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!

 

[Die Kriek]

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

 

[Derick]

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

 

[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

 

[Cat]

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

 

[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.