Legacy Support

Working with old servers means pulling out some old tricks to handle them when things get tricky.

Say, just for the sake of argument, that an old NT 4.0 box you have laying around decides over Christmas vacation to blue screen, and when you get back you notice that one of the RAID drives is toasted.

So you buy another drive for cheap from a guy on eBay and cross your fingers, but when the machine comes back, it turns out its MFT is bad. So not only has your little old server been down since Santa was in town, it looks like it's not going to be up anytime soon, either.

Attempts to run chkdsk fail because, of course, they require an NTFS filesystem which, at the moment, your box doesn't seem to think it has. So the next step is to study the partition table with some DOS tools like FDISK and AEFDISK. Neither of them seem to be offering any light on the subject, so you turn to your trusty Linux-on-a-floppy disk.

You left that at home this morning for some reason. Make a new one? You could, but tomsrtbt needs a DOS environment to install, so all those Windows 2000 and up systems you have laying around are worthless.

Plan B: a quick reformat of an old test machine you have laying around. Now that it's got just enough DOS on it to be useful, you run off to find your favorite DOS-friendly file splitting app. From there you take the tomsrtbt ZIP file, turn it into a self-extracting EXE, and break it in 1.38MB pieces. A few floppy shuffles later, and you have the EXE ready to be run in DOS and extract everything. Perfect!

Except that the EXE you just made in WinZip can't be run in DOS mode. Oh, hell.

So you scrap everything by hand — for some reason every time to try to use "deltree" on this DOS system it starts looking for the CD-ROM drive. So you go back to the tomsrtbt install ZIP, extract everything, and look for the files that are bigger than 1.44MB. There's one. Excellent! You pull that one out, split it, and dump it back in with the rest. You consolidate all the files onto two floppies' worth of space and move them over. Stitch the big file back together and everything else works just fine.

You run tomsrtbt's "install.bat" and, just because it's the only floppy disk you have that you know you can format, you end up putting tomsrtbt on the disk you just used to copy everything over from your Win2K box.

Now you have Linux on a floppy, and you secretly wonder where Tom went and why he hasn't updated his distro in about three years.