From: terje.mathisen@nospicedham.tmsw.no   
      
   Etienne Marais wrote:   
   > On Wednesday, January 4, 2023 at 7:59:02 PM UTC+2, Terje Mathisen wrote:   
   >> Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:   
   >>> On Wed, 4 Jan 2023 02:15:58 -0800 (PST)   
   >>> Etienne Marais wrote:   
   >>>   
   >>>> I have studied most of the commands and features available in debug.exe   
   now, but I am curious to why and when one would like to make use of the w   
   'write' version where you can specify the start sector of the disk. Is this   
   for very low level stuff    
   only ?   
   >>>>   
   >>> Yes. I used to use it to edit floppy disk bootsectors. (we'd get some   
   >>> boot sector viruses come in at times).   
   >> I once fixed a laptop over a sat phone link to an oil engineer working   
   >> somewhere in a Middle East desert: The Master Boot Record (MBR) had been   
   >> scrambled by a bad software crash, but I was able to get him to boot up   
   >> with a Dos floppy, enter DEBUG and then enter commands to load & list   
   >> that MBR, figure out what was wrong (I was looking at a similar laptop   
   >> in Oslo) and tell him how to enter hex bytes, verify them and then write   
   >> them back to the hard disk.   
   >>   
   >> His PC booted again on the first try. :-)   
   >>   
   >> Terje   
   >>   
   >> --   
   >> -    
   >> "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"   
   >   
   > wow   
   >   
   > I would feel proud as punch had I achieved that   
   >   
   I was just immensely relieved that I didn't have to try again, from   
   scratch. Afair I did get him to save that scrambled MBR sector to the   
   floppy, before starting to modify it, but it fortunately worked on the   
   first attempt.   
      
   Terje   
      
   --   
   -    
   "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)