Reviving a 15 year old machine

Posted on: July 18th, 2012

We work on a wide variety of machines but it’s rare to run across a computer that have survived more than a decade. We had a case just recently and we were able to get the machine revived.

The machine wasn’t an ordinary PC but a very well built industrial signal analyzer. That’s probably why it was still kicking. I attached the image of the device.

The machine was basically not starting up. It was regarded as a “boat anchor” until one day someone had an idea to try to get it fixed.

The First thing we checked was the hard drive and found that it had developed quite a few bad sectors. One of these was in an important system file. Luckily, there was a backup copy. However, even after isolating the bad sectors and recovering the system file, the system was still booting up. Then we located the oldest, working hard drive we could find (so that the motherboard of this old machine can handle it). Formatted that hard drive with a Windows 95 boot floppy (fortunately, we still have a few of those laying around) and then copied the files from the bad hard drive to it. That did the trick and the computer started up!

Here are a few more pictures of the inside of this machine and it booting Windows 95:

All in all, with some luck (the files not getting too corrupt) the machines is now fully recovered to its operational condition. Of course, the client was very happy with the result!

It’s also interesting to mention how far computers have advanced. Here’s some of the hardware specifications of this machine compared with a current, low-end machine:

Processor speed: 100 Mhz—–current machine: 3Ghz=3,000 Mhz
RAM (memory): 100 Mbytes—–current machine: 2Gbytes=2,048 Mbytes
Hard Drive: 850 Mbytes——-current machine: 320Gbytes=320,000 Mbytes

Quite a difference!