I am trying to write a simple BASIC program on an old Apple llc computer, but I cannot figure out how to format this blank floppy disc so that I can use it to save a program onto it. Can anyone help me?
Next time try providing more details. What exactly happens when you try formatting the floppy disk? What errors do you get?
Eitherway, after some research try checking out these links
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/771709#:~:text=The%20FDHD%20(Floppy%20Disk%20High,800K%20(Mac%20format)%20diskettes.
^^ An old apple thread talking about floppy disks,
Or if you have a windows computer you may try using that machine to format the flopy disk
https://howto.org/how-to-format-a-floppy-disk/
If all else fails, (and this is where more details would have been helpful) try buying USB floppy disk drive? Something like this?
https://www.amazon.com/External-Floppy-Portable-Windows-Required/dp/B00RXEWOAA/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=usb+floppy+drive&qid=1645624124&sr=8-3
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A week ago my computer start freezing every couple of seconds to 30sec-2minutes.
So i open my proccess explorer to monitor it to see if i get some CPU spikes and if so, which application is causing it.. after some freezes i noticed non of my programs/services is causing the freezes.
so i tried to check if any of my fans aren't working.. but all fans are working great.
adventually i ran the chkdsk scan (in the way i had tons of crashes/ startup problems/ i even couldnt run the windows installation disk due to a memory diagnostic problems.. I HAD Really lots of lots of problems)
adventually i found the problem, it's appear my DW hard drive is faulty and here the hard drive results:
http://pastie.org/2949300
now i'm searching the web for a tool that could fix all it's problems because i really need the drive to work.
Windows 7 ultimate 64bit.
intel e6320
4gb ddr2
ati hd5450.
Please help me if you can guide me what can i do to fix it.. (my os is on it)
Buy a new hard drive, install windows on that and see what you can read of the old disk. You're getting read and write errors in chkdsk, crashes etc, the disk is on the way out.
First of all, try to get a backup of your harddrive / your data. All actions you´re performing right now can lead to a data loss.
I don´t know if there are a web tool for fixing these problems - normally, a extended chkdsk (/r /p) should´ve fix the problems. Your log shows insufficient space on the partition. Can you move some files on another disk and try to run chkdsk again?
I have a Kingston Datatraveller Vault privacy edition with 8 GIG of space and I use a home-made program to copy images to it. Thing is, the amount of space needed for the images cab to be high as 3 times the actual size of the file while it's usually almost on par on a PC. It doesn't seem to affect other types of file though.
Does anyone knows why ?
Just so if someone has the same problem, I did find out the answer. It's because that particular key use 64K blocks instead of 4K and when you have a lot of small images, this is what happen.
So, I'm looking into Permanent DOS attacks for a class, and I'm having a hard time coming up with concrete examples. There's a lot of information about Phlashing (flashing firmware to either brick the device, or put malicious firmware in its place, for those of you who don't know the term) but I'd like to have a broader set of examples.
That being said, there has to be a way to write code that will do something like wear out disk arms, right? Something that will have the disk seek to the end of the disk, then back to the front, on and on. Anyone have an example of how that would be accomplished? Is there some way to specify where to track to on a disk in C (similar to traversing to a certain point in a file, but for the entire HDD!)? If not, I guess there's always trying to force a file's location on the disk... which seems like less fun trying to accomplish. Again, can you do something like that programmatically?
If anyone has any insight into these types of attacks, or any good resources for me to check into, I'd appreciate it. Maybe you read a story about it on Slashdot a few years back? Let me know! The more info I can gather, the less likely I'll be forced to kill time during my talk by bricking my router in the class :) I'm not made of money OR routers!
Seems like these would primarily be limited to physical attacks and social engineering ("To enable your computer's hidden turbo function, remove the cover and pry this part). But:
Adjust screen refresh rates to insane values to blow older CRTs
Monkey with ACPI fan, charge, or battery controls if possible to cause overheating or battery failure.
Overwrite every rewritable storage device of every kind attached to any bus. Discover and overwrite any IDE, USB, etc... device you know the flash updater details for.
Of course nothing is permanent. You can replace the hard drive, BIOS chips, CPU, motherboard, memory, etc...
Although it is mostly fictional, the halt and catch fire operation would be a very convenient and permanent DOS attack.
Steve Gibson (google his name) has a paper he wrote a few years back about protocol-level vulnerabilities in TCP/IP. Some of it is still pertinent today.
Socially engineer the power company or ISP to turn off service at the location in question.
Many devices in the computer today have their own firmwares, including but not limited to CPU, DVD, HDD, VGA, motherboard (BIOS) etc. Most of these devices also have a way of updating their respective firmwares. Which can also be used to brick them pretty efficiently. Although this does require an individual approach to every device, often using privileged instructions and undocumented interfaces.
It's possible for a virus to do this. I seem to recall an actual virus doing this back in the day, but can't find anything to back that up.
I was able to find an article where the author has a conversation with the VP from Western Digital wherein he states a program could potentially access a hard drive's firmware causing such a DOS attack:
There are back doors if you will that allow us to get into places that the operating system can't go through the IDE connector
There used to be a few viruses that could cause old CRT monitors to break. They could cause invalid sync signals out the VGA point that would be too high in frequency for the video sweep. I also remember a few that would use bad sector flagging to draw images on the old versions of Scandisk (we are talking early 90’s or older.) I don't remember and of the names or have any references, but they used to be quite annoying.
Fortunately better circuits, memory protection, API abstraction have made such attacked very difficult to impossible.
Lately I have been thinking about investing in a worthy USB pen drive (something along the lines of this), and install Operating Systems on Virtual Machines and start developing on them.
What I have in mind is that I want to be able to carry my development boxes, being a Windows Distribution for .Net development and a Linux Distribution for stuff like RoR, Perl and whatnot, so that I would be able to carry them around where need be...be it work, school, different computers at home etc...
I am thinking of doing this also for backup purposes...ie to backup my almost-single VM file to an external hd, instead of doing routinely updates to my normal Windows Box. I am also thinking about maybe even committing the VM boxes under Source Control (is that even feasible?)
So, am I on the right track with this ? Do you suggest that I try to implement this out?
How feasible is it to have your development box on Virtual Machine that runs from a USB Pen-Drive ?
I absolutely agree with where you are heading. I wish to do this myself.
But if you don't already know, it's not just about drive size, believe it or not USB Flash drives can be much slower than your spinning disk drives!
This can be a big problem if you plan to actually run the VMs directly from the USB drive!
I've tried running a 4GB Windows XP VM on a 32GB Corsair Survivor and the VM was virtually unusuable! Also copying my 4GB VM off and back onto the drive was also quite slow - about 10 minutes to copy it onto the drive.
If you have an esata port I'd highly recommend looking at high-speed ESata options like this Kanguru 32GB ESata/USB Flash drive OR this 32GB one by OCZ.
The read and write speeds of these drives are much higher over ESata than other USB drives. And you can still use them as USB if you don't have an ESata port. Though if you don't have an ESata port you can buy PCI to ESata cards online and even ESata ExpressCards for your laptop.
EDIT: A side note, you'll find the USB flash drives use FAT instead of NTFS. You don't want to use NTFS because it makes a lot more reads & writes on the disk and your drive will only have a limited number of reads & writes before it dies. But by using FAT you'll be limited to max 2GB file size which might be a problem with your VM. If this is the case, you can split your VM disks into 2GB chunks. Also make sure you backup your VM daily incase your drive does reach it's maximum number of writes. :)
This article on USB thumbdrives states,
Never run disk-intensive applications
directly against files stored on the
thumb drive.
USB thumbdrives utilize flash memory and these have a maximum number of writes before going bad and corruption occurs. The author of the previously linked article found it to be in the range of 10,000 - 100,000 writes but if you are using a disk intensive application this could be an issue.
So if you do this, have an aggressive backup policy to backup your work. Similarly, if when you run your development suite, if it could write to the local hard drive as a temporary workspace this would be ideal.
Hopefully you are talking about interpreted language projects. I couldn't imagine compiling a C/C++ of any size on a VM, let alone a VM running off of a USB drive.
I do it quite frequently with Xen, but also include a bare metal bootable kernel on the drive. This is particularly useful when working on something from which a live CD will be based.
The bad side is the bloat on the VM image to keep it bootable across many machines .. so where you would normally build a very lean and mean paravirtualized kernel only .. you have to also include one that has everything including the kitchen sink (up to what you want, i.e. do you need Audio, or token ring, etc?)
I usually carry two sticks, one has Xen + a patched Linux 2.6.26, the other has my various guest images which are ready to boot either way. A debootstrapped copy of Debian or Ubuntu makes a great starting point to create the former.
If nothing else, its fun to tinker with. Sorry to be a bit GNU/Linux centric, but that's what I use exclusively :) I started messing around with this when I had to find an odd path to upgrading my distro, which was two years behind the current one. So, I strapped a guest, installed what I wanted and pointed GRUB at the new LV for my root file system. Inside, I just mounted my old /home LV and away I went.
Check out MojoPac:
http://www.mojopac.com/
Hard-core gamers use it to take world of warcraft with them on the go -- it should work fine for your development needs, at least on Windows. Use cygwin with it for your unix-dev needs.
I used to do this, and found that compiling was so deathly slow, it wasn't worth it.
Keep in mind that USB flash drives are extremely slow (maybe 10 to 100 times slower) compared to hard drives at random write performance (writing lots of small files to a partition which already has lots of files).
A typical build process using GNU tools will create lots of small files - a simple configure script creates thousands of small files and deletes them again just to test the environment before you even start compiling. You could be waiting a long time.
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I make extensive use of source control for anything that relates to a project I'm working on (source, docs etc.) and I've never lost anything that way.
However, I have had two or three crashes (spread over the last 4 years) on my development machine that forced me to reinstall my system and reconfigure my apps (eclipse, vim, Firefox, etc.). For weeks after reinstalling, I was missing one little app or another, some PHP or Python module wasn't there, stuff like that.
While this is not fatal, it's very annoying and sucks up time. Because it seemed so rare, I didn't bother about an actual solution, but meanwhile I've developed a mindset where I just don't want stuff like that happening anymore.
So, what are good backup solutions for a development machine? I've read this very similar question, but that guy really wants something different than me.
What I want is to have spare harddrives on the shelf and reduce my recovery time after a crash to something like an hour or less.
Thinking about this, I figured there might also be a way to use the backup mechanism for keeping two or more dev workstations in sync, so I can continue work at a different PC anytime.
EDIT: I should've mentioned that
I'm running Linux
I want incremental backup, so that it's cheap to do it frequently (once or twice a day)
RAID is good, but I'm on a laptop most of the time, no second hd in there, no E-SATA and I'm not sure about RAIDing to a USB drive: would that actually work?
I've seen sysadmins use rsync, has anybody had any experiences with that?
I would set up the machine how you like it and then image it. Then, you can set up rsync(or even SVN) to backup your homedir nightly/etc.
Then when your computer dies, you can reimage, and then redeploy your home dir.
The only problem would be upgraded/new software, but the only way to deal completely with that would be to do complete nightly backups of your drive(s).
Thanks, this sounds like a good suggestion. I think it should be possible to also update the image regularly (to get software updates / installs), but maybe not that often. E. g. I could boot the image in a VM and perform a global package update or something.
Hanno
You could create an image of your workstation after you've installed & configured everything. Then when your computer crashes, you can just restore the image.
A (big) downside to this, is that you won't have any updates or changes you've made since you created the image.
Cobian Backup is a reliable backup system for Windows that will perform scheduled backups to an external drive.
You could create a hard drive image. Restoring from a backup image restores everything to the exact state that it was at the time you took the image.
Or you could create an installer that installs just about everything needed.
Since you expressed interest in rsync, here's an article that covers how to make a bootable backup image via rsync for Debian Linux:
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/575
Rsync is fast and easy for local and network syncing and is by nature incremental.
You can use RAID-1 for that. It’s the synchronize type, not the backup type.
I use RAID mirroring in conjunction with an external hard drive using Vista's system backup utility to backup the entire machine. That way I can easily fix a hard drive failure, but in the event my system becomes corrupted, I can restore from the E-SATA drive (which I only connect for backup).
Full disclosure: I've never had to restore the backup, so it's kind of like the airbag in your car; hopefully it works when you need it, but there's no way to be sure. Also, the backup process is manual (it can be automated) so I'm only as safe as the last backup.
You can use the linux "dd" command line utility to clone a hard drive.
Just boot from a linux cd, clone or restore your drive and reboot.
It works great for Windows/Mac drives too.
This will clone partition 1 of the first hard drive (/dev/sda) to partition 1 of the second drive (/dev/sdb)
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1
This will clone partition 1 of the first hard drive to a FILE on the second drive.
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/drive2/backup/2009-02-25.iso
Simply swap the values for if= and of= to restore the drive.
If you boot from the Ubuntu live CD it will automount your USB drives making it easy to perform the backup/restore with external drive(s).
CAUTION: Verify the identity of your drives BEFORE running the above commands. It's easy to overwrite the wrong drive if you not careful.
Guess this is not exactly what you are looking for, but I just document all what I install and configure on a machine. Google Docs lets me do this from anywhere, and keeps the document intact when the machine crashes.
A good step by step document usually reduces the recovery time to one day or so
If you use a Mac, just plug in an external hard drive and Time Machine will do the rest, creating a complete image of your machine on the schedule you set. I restored from a Time Machine image when I swapped out the hard drive in my MacBook Pro and it worked like a charm.
One other option that a couple of guys use at my company is to have their development environment on a large Linux server. They just use their local machines to run an NX client to access the remote desktop (NX is much faster than VNC) - this has the advantages of fast performance, automatic backup of their files on the server, and the fact that they're developing on the same hardware that our customers use.
No matter what solution you use, it is always a good idea to have a secondary backup, too. Secondary backup should be off-site and include your essential work (source code, important docs). In case something happens to your main site (fire at the office, somebody breaks in and steals all your hardware, etc.), you would still be able to recover, eventually.
There are many online backup solutions. You could just get a remote storage at a reliable provider (e.g. Amazon S3) and sync your work on a daily basis. The solution depends on the type of access you can get, but rsync is probably the tool you would use for that.