On Wed, 27 Dec 2000 04:43:06 +0200 Or Botton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I have received an XT computer from someone who was about to trow it
> away. However, I have a slight problem: its wet.
> It seems that the owner stored the XT in the basement some time before
> winter, and rain managed to get trough and wet it. Could have been
> in water for days, or even weeks. Not more then a month.
> Its not "full with water", however just by holding the case or screen
> you can feel moisture. Diskettes dont look so good, either. (stickers
> look ok, though. So I dont think it was in water for long.)
> So the big question: what am I going to do with it in this situation?
> Leaving it out in the sun isnt a good idea since its winter.
> Is that thing even safe to mess with?
I once went to an open air flea-market just as a heavy downpour and
thunderstorm was ending. Vendors there were busy removing the tarpaulins
from their tables in order to display their merchandise to all the
prospective customers who began to arrive in droves now that the storm had
ended. I noticed one vendor remove an XT from atop his tarpaulin and then
set it down in a mud puddle beside his table. He had been using the XT as
a weight to keep the wind from blowing away his tarpaulin. I asked him if
he would sell the XT. He said he would take three dollars for it, as is,
meaning of course that he would offer no opinion as to whether anyone could
ever make the thing work. (That was about eight years ago when the going
price for a perfectly functioning XT with an MFM hard drive was about fifty
dollars.) I gladly paid the three dollars the vendor was asking and I took
the machine home. I removed it from the case and stored it in a dry place
for about two weeks. Then I placed a system disk in the A drive, plugged it
in, turned it on, and it booted! I found that it had 640K of memory. I
could not access the hard drive. Next I ran FDISK on the hard drive. The
program recognized it. I established a primary DOS partition and then I
formatted the drive. Norton Disk Doctor then found the hard drive to be in
perfect condition and with no bad sectors. Three dollars was a fabulous
bargain for a perfectly good XT in those days!
All the best,
Sam Heywood
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