A customer needed some data recovered from an old computer… They said it gets part way through the bootup, and then it won’t go any further.

 It sounds simple enough.

However, the computer is very old. It uses an old 5-pin AT socket for the keyboard (most PCs now use either USB or a 6-pin PS2 socket).

I’m told the original keyboard died a long time ago, and was replaced with a wireless keyboard (and mouse) plugged into a USB socket (usb is available via a usb ISA card). This PC has seen many upgrades!

Anyway, PC boots (windows 98 ), then generates a norton error while in dos mode… since its in dos mode, keyboard and mouse don’t respond… so no way to continue into windows.

I don’t carry the older AT keyboard with me (its so rare to find these old PCs anyway). So all I can do is take the PC away (I have the older AT keyboards at the office)… I then manage to boot the PC, and it all seems to operate normally.

So I take out the HDD, and plug it into my office PC, extract all the data to my main drive. I clean up the data (remove temporary internet files, temp files, etc, then burn the remaining data onto 2 CDs

Once back at the customer, I take about 10 minutes to extract the data they want, tweak the application that needs the data to function properly, and I’m on my way again.