Acorn Archimedes hard disk memory

[dongfeng]

I have a funny memory from my school days and was wondering if it really was how I remember it.

We had Acorn Archimedes at school, which superseded the old BBC Micros. I am guessing this was at the very early '90s. They didn't have hard disks and all software was on floppy.

There was one all mighty powerful Archie in the library - this one had a hard disk with all the applications on it (woo!)!

Being rather mischievous at the time, one friend told us that if you pressed a certain key when it was booting (seem to recall it was R), it erased the hard disk!

Of course, someone tried this, and yes, all the software was gone...

So we got the floppies from the other computers, copied all the shortcuts to the desktop so it looked normal and quickly ran away :mrgreen:

The next day in school assembly, the (clueless) head of IT gave an angry lecture about how someone had 'stolen' the software from this computer and demanded the guilty party gave it back :lol:

I remember that the school had to pay someone to come in and set it all up again... they never did find out...

Was it really that easy to wipe/kill an Archimedes hard drive?

 

[paul.brett]

You there boy! See me after school.

 

[dongfeng]

It wasn't me, honest! :D

 

[broadcaststorm]

Holding down "R" when booting an Archi results in the CMOS being restored to factory settings, which usually means it will "forget" the hard drive.
Pressing F12 at the desktop gives you a command prompt then typing "*configure hard disc :1" or running the !Configure utility from the Apps folder would normally "re activate" the drive.
HTH