That Special Touch
What a day.
It all began when the boss brought an old touch-screen monitor (an IBM G70t) and asked me to hook it up and make it work. By some miracle, he even had the installation disks.
The only free machine was an older Dell PowerEdge which, as luck would have it, contained substantially all of the boss’s files, correspondence, worksheets, and opther artifacts from his previous companies. (“John,” he once told me, “that old beast is worth more to me than all of the other computers in here put together.”)
Great.
So I installed the drivers and got no love — missing TOUCH.DLL. Luckily, I was able to find a much newer version of the drivers. I checked the README, and found they were even compatible with NT4.
Except they weren’t. After I installed the new drivers I got the wicked Blue Screen of Death. No amount of cajoling (VGA mode? Last Known Good?) seemed to wake the stubborn server. The Small Business Server discs that contained NT4 Server were, of course, not bootable. And as luck would have it, the system was formatted with NTFS so there was no way I was going to get to anything without some NT loving.
Miraculously, I found a floppy labeled “Emergency Repair Disk.” Tried to start from that: no dice. Except… wait! what was this? Three original setup disks! Put those in and waited for the chance to press “R” for repair. It never came.
Then I discovered the Microsoft deliberately disables that feature. Apparently unattended installation is more important than repair.
I modified Microsoft’s setup disk and finally, after hours of pain and suffering, I was able to get everything back. Afterward, all I could think was: if I’d stayed in bed this morning, this never would have happened.