A Writer’s Work Restored, But The Writer….Vanished?
This is a story of a Vintage Macintosh Color Classic owned by a woman writer who first came to my Mac Museum in the Eugene Nextstep Recycling’s Receiving Department at the first of the week.
She needed a boot floppy disk because her Color Classic could no longer find its hard disk. I had one and gave it to her to take home and try to make it boot to fix that drive. It was important to her because her writings were on the hard drive.
She returned on Friday with her Mac and the sad news that the boot disk didn’t work for her. I told her to leave the Mac with me. I would try to salvage the data and save her writings.
I asked for contact information so I could get back to her if I succeeded in saving her Mac.
I discovered that her hard drive was not staying “spun-up”. I took a radical step I’d used before with my own old Macs, and took the top plate off the hard drive. I discovered that a plastic read-head parking device, I call a “sail” switch, was stuck and wouldn’t let the head move over the platters. That stressed out the motor and it shut the drive off.
Freeing the “sail switch” let the drive spin up and stay turning. I immediately hooked the hard drive to another drive and copied the contents. Then, I pulled a wiped drive out of my drawer and placed it into the Color Classic.
I fired up the Mac and quickly re-copied her complete information to the new internal hard disk. This worked. All of her data was safely recovered and reusable.
Then the mystery: The contact information I was given was not correct.
I was stunned. I had hopes of giving her the great news so she could go on and finish the book, manuscript or submission she had so long worked on.
Sadly a reunion may never come to pass. The restored but now-orphaned Macintosh Color Classic may never see it’s loving owner again. I am using this combined Rescued Relic and Hall of Strange entry in an effort to get this lonely Mac back to the one who needs it. If you are reading this or listen to our show today,
Please….
Your Mac is well again. It misses you. Come back. It’s waiting for you here in the Mac Museum at Nextstep Recycling Eugene for the day when you walk through those receiving doors once again…….
