Not exactly a 'development' story, but.. I was working late one night at the office when the main phone line rang. It was a small company so there was a good c

Not exactly a 'development' story, but.. I was working late one night at the office when the main phone line rang. It was a small company so there was a good chance I'd know the caller so I answered it (with the phone on my desk with all those light-up buttons for lines). If was from RnD support engineers on the west coast working on an IBM project. One of the dev machines hard drives got wiped out. They didn't have distributed source control (it was the 90s) and this particular machine had a lot of new code on it. The machine was running OS/2 with the HPFS filesystem. Sometimes, I'd read various books and documents on the office bookshelves late at night. One particular one that I'd read recently was co-incidentally about the HPFS filesystem in those 'IBM red books'. I figured they have nothing more to lose so I came up with a plan. - connect by dial-up modem to transfer the DOS 'nu' Norton utility @9600 bps. - boot DOS and copy select sectors and ranges of sectors from another machine - boot DOS and plaster those select sectors and ranges to the damaged machine - boot OS/2 safe-mode and run the HPFS chkdsk with the option to build file entries for anything that looks like filesystem data structures - reboot The magical sectors were the MBR and superblock boot sectors + backup copy, the central directory in the middle of the disk (for lower average seek time) and the main allocation tables. There are also bands of locally allocated ranges on the disk but I didn't try to do anything with those. Long story, medium-length, it all worked. He bought me beer and mongolian bbq when I came to visit. There was another story about recovering a NetWare LAN partition when it got corrupted and all the file entries got deleted. That was easier, it required dinner first chicken-club with lots of mayo--can't think well on an empty stomach--then figuring out that there's a 'trash can' file area. And manually undeleting everything we could find with the help of others that were in the office. I don't remember exactly how many 10k+ files we undeleted but it took a while. Some people were annoyed that files they deleted were back the next day. I have another story about a group project that used up all timeshare credits and couldn't access the group assignment program. I pulled an all-nighter talking to a sr who knew a lot about CMS features, so I co-incidentally liked all our drive allocations across accounts. Worked like magic elves. My best contributions code-wise is not writing it and instead getting people to think in a way that by re-arranging what we already have in slight ways that if you look at it funny will do what you want.