Re: Viewing pick files without booting

"kittygalore" wrote
The old system does boot and gets to Menu. Its just that after a few
minutes, the hard drive and computer turn off. I presumed this
was either it was trying to access information that was corrupted or
could not get past the bad sector. Is there a command that I can run
to quit the menu and go to something like a shell and do the file-
save? It can run for as long as 10 minutes before crashing.
It appears that there is a full set of installation disks so maybe I
can get something up and running from a new hard drive about the same
size (1.2 Gig).
Jeffrey
Advanced Pick had a copy-protected first installation disk, that 'knew'
how many user licenses you had purchased. Unless that disk is still good,
you cannot install on that new hard drive.
I'd bet good money that that first dsk won't be able to make your
transplanted
partition bootable without wiping all the data, for that matter.

You say you can run the old system for brief intervals, and allude to a
'menu'.
Then your mission is to break out of the menu to a tcl ":" prompt -- try the
control-break keyboard pair to try and get out of that autorun menu. If
that gets
you a * prompt or a :: prompt, type END and hit enter to get to
: prompt.
If instead it gets you to a ! prompt you're in the system debugger. Erm,
I think
Q {case sensitive} gets you out, but am not sure.
You didn't mention it, but if the menu only appears after you login at a
USER: prompt, then try logging in as SYSPROG {or did AP have the alternate
account name DM even back then ... I forget} instead of POS or whatever
account you've been using.

Suggest you power up the server, but jump into the cmos setup screens
{usually
DELete key will do this, or maybe F2 key} and just sit there without
booting
further for about half an hour, just to see if the system is powering itself
off due
to motherboard and/or power supply and/or minor short in disk or tape or
cdrom
etc drives is the problem instead of pick freaking out.

At TCL, I still don't know how you could get stuff copied to another,
nonpick
partition; the copypick comand was intended for this, but I wasted a great
deal of
time tinkering with it back then, and never did get happy results, somehow.
Instead I ended up using dos-formatted floppies to move stuff off of pick
boxes;
you need to
SET-DEVICE 0 to attach the floppy drive,
T-REW
COPY MYFILE item1 item2 item3
to: ( mydir
presuming a picki file MYFILE in this account, and an A:\mydir\
subdirectory on the floppy disk.
to: ( a:mydir or
to: ( a:/mydir
also works, except not on the very oldest ap versions. And yes, you should
type
it as a:/mydir instead of as a:\mydir -- pick will internally use it as
a:\mydir just fine.
<<< this is a very old memo file I'm reading from; I bet you have to put
A: in
there to prevent pick from thinking you want to copy to a pick
file called
MYDIR, but I just don't remember for sure after all these years

do the command
T-DET
to fully commit changes to the floppy before you remove the media.
{This also undoes the SET-DEVICE 0
If item names do not fit the 8char then "." then 3char filename limits of
the floppy, the error message pick gives mentions 'illegal characters',
as it does if you have, well, illegal characters like item id
"John's.dat"


If you have been using the Accuterm serial terminal emulator on a windows
box
instead of a true serial terminal, you may have the optional but extremely
nice file
transfer utilities installed {ftpick, for example}.
In your situation I'd prefer to login to the ailing pick box and also to a
healthy one
using two screens inside accuterm, and use ftpick to move all the items of a
file
to the healthy box. This avoids the floppy-full situation of salvage using
a stack
of dos-formatted floppies. And adjust Accuterm to keep some scroll-buffers
so
you can use the mouse to look at earlier screens, even after the latest
crash of
the sick box. For that matter, you could copy/paste onscreen text using
the mouse.
And ftpick is quite happy to work across platforms, like from an old sick
advanced
pick box onto a shiny new d3/linux box.


.

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