Now I know how we feel when we are about to loss someone we depend on!!

For last three days I was under tremendous pressure. I had almost lost my all data at office. I have been using LAN based on Novell Netware on DOS platform since 1996. The networking system has never given trouble. But three days ago suddenly the server PC stopped working due to SMPS failure. I called engineer to have look, he took the PC with him for checking, and at the noon he declared that my system has lost its soul and heart, i.e. motherboard and SMPS.

I griefed for a moment for the PC, it served me loyally nearly for 8 years, and then I decided to buy new system. So HDD was removed from the old PC and fitted in a standby PC for short period. But I was aghast when I looked to the data on HDD on the system. My old and trusty SeaGate HDD was of 1GB and more then 50% was full, but it was showing only 10 MB of data on the entire HDD. I checked again and again without any success. On other hand no engineer at the service centre was also able to understand the problem with HDD. When they installed HDD in the system with Windows XP, in system management of XP recognised only one portion of HDD as FAT16 and labelled the remaining chunk as unrecognised partition. Surprisingly it was showing only data upto Dec'99, so after much reckoning we came to conclusion that my HDD was suffering with some kind of Y2K problem.

Then it was decided to have second opinion of expert of Novell Netware. As the Novell Netware was age old system only one person in entire town had knowledge, the person who originally installed the LAN at my office. So the case was referred to him, he checked the HDD and gave me some consolation that I should try HDD in some old PC like 386 or 486. Now, again it was difficult to find a 486 system in the era of Pentium 4. So I went for PC hunting looking for the matching configuration as my demised PC. For next two days I went to all the computer shop which may have old PC , called everyone whom I believed still living happily with his/her old PC and I brought all the PC to the service centre, some time I took HDD to someone to shop where there were many matching PC could be found.

Ultimately yesterday I found a PC which matched the exact configuration I was looking for. When we installed HDD in the system , the system grinned for some moment then I saw booting process and mounting of all the Novell partition created in the HDD. But still it did not show all the data, hurriedly I called the expert , he simply suggested that original LAN card in the system, so I brought everything to his place and fitted everything together and lo! it was working as usual.

Then he advised me to update the entire networking system, and get it updated to window as he warned my that next time if same thing happens you won't be find matching PC. So I have decided update my networking system.

As I required new system in place of the old , first decided to buy a laptop, but then I decided against it and have purchased a desktop PC with latest motherboard and all the gizmo.