!rant
The first computer I used for serious programming. Z80 CPU, 32kB ROM and 32kB RAM, 5.25" 320kB floppies, and the year was 1982.

Look at those floppies!

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

Heh.. Came across my first PC last week :) oh the nostalgy... Entity, Mach3, wolfeinstein 3d, Dangerous Dave in a haunted mansion and a guy pushing boxes in a 2d maze.

DOS, nc and windows 3.1 [in that pile of 5" floppies bottom left].

oh the times!

Some time 199x, when I was still a little kiddo, my dad bought a PC. It had a big ass HDD (dimensions-wise), 1x 3.5" floppy disk drive and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. It ran DOS. Dad managed to hook up a dot matrix Epson printer to it and used the computer for writing... whatever, really :)

Then dad got some of those 5" floppies with games and installed them on our PC. Mach3, Indy, Entity and Atlantis were my favourite ones. Later we got Wolfenstein 3-D, but that was just too scary, too intense for me.

All that was years before we got Windows 3.0 installed there.

Why is it that software has gotten so hardware heavy these days?

I get that some things require more ram, larger screen resolutions and games.

But even calculator apps are now in the hundreds of MB when the entire Microsoft office suite used to come on a couple of floppies.

Is it laziness and relying on ever higher level languages or is there some reason that stuff gets unnecessarily large now.

My First !Experience : Disappointment with a computer

My mum kept tons of floppies but we didnt have a computer at home. Went to my friends house, who had one, and had Encarta 95 (its like a fun wikipedia for kids). When I mentioned I had floppies, he asked for one, since he didnt have one. We copied Encarta to that floppy hoping we would cheat in the next computer science test. We even tested it.

After we were certain that all works (you should know we were surprised that it could fit in one floppy), we got to school, put the disk in and voila

we had copied a shortcut :)

TIL one of the first few issues on the ISS was that they had a laptop that wouldn't boot. The (pirated, some say) copy of Norton Ghost they had on a floppy was also suffering from bad sectors, so it wouldn't boot. These guys had an entire floppy image beamed up from base to replace a copy of Norton Ghost. (Some say this was a pirated copy of Norton Ghost, as none of the floppies had the official label, instead all had either hand-written or custom-made labels.)

Then they had codepage issues.

First experience with a PC....

It would have been the Commodore64 and those giant 5.25" floppies, ah those were the days with CRT TV's.

Watching a friend load up Tetris on that big screen was eye opening for a 8-9 Year old.

All the cool kids in the neighborhood owning a Commodore 64. I was about 7-8 I think. Piracy was big back then, the kids swapped those large floppies and tapes containing hundreds of games through the mail. And all those cool hacktros, trainers, intros and whatnot got me interested in computer graphics and programming.

I have a LOT of Floppies but no floppy drive that works with my current Win7 machine, and my XP one is in multiple boxes for parts... so for now I can only stare at NetWare 4 to 4.2, WfW 3.11 and DOS 6-22.

Smart me made VMs on his XP machine and transferred them to his Win7 one.

I also have data tapes... now that is NEVER gonna work on my Win7 so... anyone knows how it could *possibly* work out?

Also... I got documentation on Compaq servers... those are nice.

AAAAAAND since I’m a huge MIDI nerd... I have a SC-55mkII hooked on the UM-ONE mkII and those shitty cans that I’m gonna switch (hopefully) soon for a nice pair of Cakewalks MA-15Ds.

Also, I’m looking for one of them 5150s because 80s IBM and since I also like keyboards... the one and only Model M.

Anyone can hook me up with a cheap one?

I missed this last week... so too bad ;)

My introduction into programming was rather slow. When I was a child, we had an Apple IIc, but there were no disks. When you'd boot it up, you got a prompt and I recall being able to type commands into it that someone told me was "Apple BASIC".

At the same time, our family computer was a 386 and it came with something called GWBasic. I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as well, and I recall finding the moves for the game on an AOL usenet. I took them all and wrote a program in BASIC that let you search and find moves for your character. I distributed this on some floppies to friends.

After that I lost interest. My "Information Systems" shop in high school was more about how to use Office than it was about programming. A few years later I found out that you could run your own text-based games (MUDs) and I quickly jumped into that and the C language.

From there, I was in and out of programming - C, to C++. Java and PHP, then back to Java. It would be about 15 years later until I finally realized I wasn't bad at this and land a job doing it. :)

so apparently my desktop hdd is going bad in the most infuriating way possible: Read speeds are perfectly fine, but write speeds are literally peaking at 600 BYTES PER SECOND. I waited A LITERAL 25 MINUTES (i timed it, 24m51s) to get to the login process. It's performing worse than 320k floppies do.

The disk is 13% full and 0% fragmented. It's negotiating SATA 3.

Time to w&r ig

Finding 2x external USB (!) Floppy drives in the trash.. there were still customer data on the floppies inside it. Was a great day. Still have one :)

commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:

Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)

some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.

the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.

some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.

some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.

how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...

ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...

!rant
I have an old laptop with a built-in floppy drive which I want to use to recover data from a bunch of AtariST Double Density disks.

Can anyone recommend a Linux distro and package for getting the job done? This is the only job it needs to do before being donated to a museum ;)