Re: c00l hack

Article: 7593 of alt.hackers
From: Terje.Mathisen@hda.hydro.com (Terje Mathisen)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: c00l hack
Date: 4 Apr 1995 07:03:25 GMT
Organization: Hydro Data, Norsk Hydro (Norway)
Lines: 31
Approved: Yes.
Message-ID: 3lqqvt$t6a@vkhdsu01.hda.hydro.com
Reply-To: Terje.Mathisen@hda.hydro.com (Terje Mathisen)
NNTP-Posting-Host: sk08ts.hda.hydro.com
X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.02
Status: RO

In <3lqcbn$h6h@case.cyberspace.com>, wsantee@cyberspace.com (Wes
Santee) writes:

>ObHack:
>Hmmmm, while we're on the data recovery motif, I remember when I had
>to talk a guy through a complete drive rebuild over the phone.  The
>hack was that the guy knew about 20 words in English so after
>explaining what some of the keys on the keyboard were, I did it
>entirely blind by telling him to do nothing but things like "Press
>TAB 3 times, type 145, press Enter."  He couldn't explain to me what
>was on his screen so I had to just try to mentally perceive what he
>was seeing and act accordingly.

Ob_Similar_But_Easier_Hack:

90 min on a lousy phone line to Teheran, where a group of company employees
had been interred (sp?) in their hotel rooms, directly after arriving at
the airport.

The only work they could get done, was using a Compaq laptop they had brought
along, which then had been trashed by a partition/boot sector virus.

It took about an hour to talk him through the neccesary modifications to
recover the hard disk.

I was _very_ glad he had DiskEdit available, so I didn't have to attempt it
using debug!  :-)

-Terje Mathisen (include std disclaimer) <Terje.Mathisen@hda.hydro.com>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

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